Invents Quotes & Sayings

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them. — Mark Twain

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute. — George Bernard Shaw

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own. — Gary Snyder

Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents (eating the couch, digging a hole through the living room floor, biting the mailman, etc.). It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something (myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind). — Elizabeth Gilbert

When writing fantasy
novels, one must be careful what one
invents. For every benefit, there is
usually a drawback. — J.K. Rowling

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation. — Joseph Conrad

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. — John Steinbeck

Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. — John Steinbeck

And my religious hunger, now invents God
To make them a frame, to fill the void.

Then my silly pious sense of harmony
Loudly rejoices in orderly actuality

But already, my fierce rebellion, the best poet
Calmly sharpens a knife on the stone of my heart. — Rafal Wojaczek

Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidentally cause floods and earthquakes. — Christopher Hitchens

Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation. — Marshall McLuhan

Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that "we must have like to produce like." In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that "all is given." Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need. — Henri Bergson

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void. — Diane Setterfield

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. — Margaret Mead

Man invents nothing God did not create first. — Mitch Albom

Wine invents nothing; it only tattles. — Friedrich Schiller

Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause. — Christian Nestell Bovee

There seems to be at least one common denominator to all intelligent life: it was bipedal and bimannual. Four legs was the most practical number for any animal on any planet, and it seems that nature has nothing else to work with. When she decided to give intelligence to a species, she taught him to stand on his hind legs, freeing his forefeet to become tools of his intellect. And she usually taught him by making him use his hands to climb. As a Cophian biologist had said, Life first tries to climb a tree to get to the stars. When it fails, it comes down and invents the high-C drive. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

I lied a lot when I was a kid. Somehow, I still do this today, but maybe in another way - not quite as ridiculously clumsily as I used to. But still, I think making music has a lot to do with it. One invents something that one can't possibly be. With songs, one invents a world that wouldn't exist otherwise. — Sophie Hunger

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. — Jean Arp

When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality. — Jean Genet

Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem. As Harry Launder sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road ... — Irvine Welsh

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering? — Margaret Atwood

With songs one invents a world that wouldn't exist otherwise. And in that world you can be more than you actually are. — Sophie Hunger

What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds, a parasite asks 'Where's my share?' A man creates, a parasite says 'What will the neighbors think?' A man invents, a parasite says 'Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God ... — Andrew Ryan

When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn't good for a person to be alone. — Donald Miller

Man's greatest advances are weapon advances. Culture follows from weaponry, we are militant like the animals and birds - defending our homes. No matter how far back you go in history, along with the struggle for existence, along with the survival necessities - kill or be killed, eat or be eaten - there is a hunger for something spiritual. He invents God, prayers, incantations to something above him. Why? This is not brought out - this is not weapon culture. — Frank Capra

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it — Elbert Hubbard

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism. — Werner Herzog

Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene ... — Daniel Gilbert

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. — Helene Cixous

It is with logic that one proves; it is with intuition that one invents. — Henri Poincare

Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are unacceptable. — Geoffrey Wolff

The customer invents nothing. New products and new services come from the producer. — W. Edwards Deming

Nobody ever invents anything You're inspired and sometimes you can improve. — Sebastien Foucan

I prefer music that invents a universe. — Matthew Bellamy

True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton 's Strange Story; "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria! — H. P. Blavatsky

Man invents war. Man discovers peace. He invents war from without. He discovers peace from within. War man throws. Peace man sows. The smile of war is the flood of human blood. The smile of peace is the love, below, above. — Sri Chinmoy

Mankind invents things to fight about. — Mike Love

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. — Joyce Carol Oates

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines. — Dean Koontz

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time. — Leo Tolstoy

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes. — Oscar Wilde

To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary. — Astro Teller

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. — Karen Haber

Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper. — John Dos Passos

When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. — Victor Hugo

I'm not the only taxpayer who has no idea what he's sending to the IRS. This year, only 28 percent of all Americans will prepare their own tax returns, according to a voice in my head that invents accurate-sounding statistics. — Dave Barry

Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some. — Jose Marti

You can't just run out and start the car until some cat invents a car. — Lenny Bruce

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind. — Henry Ward Beecher

The truly original artist invents his own signs. — Henri Matisse

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. — R.D. Laing

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. — Edward St. Aubyn

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed. — Larry Wall

The best propaganda omits rather than invents — Mason Cooley

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics). — Robert Anton Wilson

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. — C.S. Lewis

Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. — W. Somerset Maugham

As a general rule, biology tends to be conservative. It's rare that evolution 'invents' the same process several times. — Gero Miesenbock

A writer of fiction is really ... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. — Ernest Hemingway,

Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support ... In acts of supreme self-deception, at various times and in various places he has been willing to profess belief in the most incredible myths because of what they have promised him. — Paul Kurtz

An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies. — Andre Gide

Cupcakes The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They're cooks, not chefs. A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs. — Seth Godin

American invents everything, but the trouble is we get tired of it the minute the new is wore off. — Will Rogers

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. — Cynthia Ozick

A true business opportunity is the on that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on. — Michael E. Gerber

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is. — Victor Cousin

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — Susan Sontag

Who can really say who invents something first in fashion? — Azzedine Alaia

As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generaitons, giving brith to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire ... I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free excpet when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for. — Orson Scott Card

To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act. — Margaret Mead

Each era invents its own child. Over the past 500 years, conceptions of the child changed gradually from an ill-formed adult who must be subjugated to society's goals to a precious being who must be protected from unreasonable social demands. Childhood has come to be seen as a special period of life, rather than as a temporary state of no lasting importance for adulthood. — Sandra Scarr

The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better. — Jose Saramago

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt. — Mark Twain

It's just that I landed up in a terrific capitalist system. One that pays people who allocate capital extraordinarily well. Intrinsically, I'm not worth as much as somebody who invents something that could improves people's life, or health or whatever. — Warren Buffett

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it. — Gustave Flaubert

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done? — Ursula K. Le Guin

A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.
A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.
So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote. — William Butler Yeats

I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature. — Jack Kerouac

I think I know the real reason." "Which is?" "Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol. — Iain Banks

Victor Vigny: It is like the old fairy tale. The boy saves the princess; they fall in love. He invents a flying machine - along with his dashing teacher, of course. They get married and name thier firstborn after the aforementioned dashing teacher.
Conor: I don't recall that fairy tale from the nursery.
Victor Vigny: Trust me, It's a classic. — Eoin Colfer

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist ... — Ernest Gellner

Common sense invents and constructs no less than its own field than science does in its domain. It is, however, in the nature of common sense not to be aware of this situation. — Albert Einstein

Art is not truth. Truth conforms to reality. Art invents reality. — Walter Darby Bannard

Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this ... The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents ... Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything. — Ayn Rand

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment "already"? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a "cristallisation," so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different. — Czeslaw Milosz

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them. — Octavio Paz

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. — Gustave Flaubert

Finally I grinned and said, "I won't eat meat if it's been overcooked." She (Amarinda) glanced up at me, confused, and I added, "I thought you should know that, since we're going to be friends now."
Amarinda's smile widened. "I think it's unfair that women aren't allowed to wear trousers. They seem far more comfortable than dresses."
I chuckled. "They're not. Every year I think fashion invents one more piece I have to add to my wardrobe."
"And one more layer to my skirts." She thought for a moment, then said, "I think it's funny when you're rude to the cook. I shouldn't admit that, but his face turns all sorts of colors when you are and there's nothing he can do about it."
"He can overcook my meat. — Jennifer A. Nielsen

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. — Terry Pratchett

Music is the electric soil in which the spirit thinks, lives and invents. All that's electrical stimulates the mind to flowing surging musical creation. I am electrical by nature. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

You try and live your life as normally as possible and if someone invents a rumor that I have two vaginas, so be it. There's nothing I can do about it. — Michael Vartan

Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes. — Alfred Kinsey

I think love is sort of a con you play on yourself. I think the whole conception of love is something the previous generation invents to justify having created you. You know I think the real reason children are born is because parents are so bored they have children to amuse themselves. They're so bored they don't have anything else to do so they have a child because that will keep them busy for a while. Then to justify to the kid the reason he exists they tell him there's such a thing as love and that's where you come from because me and your daddy or me and your mommy were in love and that's why you exist. When actually it was because they were bored out of their minds. — Richard Hell

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!
That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and ... Raoule was not a nun. — Rachilde

Christianity, righty understood, is utterly unlike religion that man invents. It is so completely contrary to the way man does things that it must have come from God. Take Christmas, for example; only God could have thought of that. When man invents a super being, he comes up with a Superman, or a Captain Marvel. God gives the world a baby. — Richard Halverson

Man is naturally lazy, therefore he invents labor-saving devices. — Ignacy Jan Paderewski