I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that’s not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.

Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything‘s changed. That’s a very appealing picture; however, it’s just not true. Medicine today is a team sport.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.

There’s a radical – and wonderful – new idea here… that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people’s ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world. Its an idea with revolutionary implications. If we take it seriously.

Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, said that whenever he could not see his way clearly, he knelt down and prayed for light and understanding.

Nature is a tinkerer, not an inventor.

In our case, I, a working engineer, inventor and scientist, am bringing new innovation to campaigning to enable a grass-roots movement.

Your nightmare existence in a trunk is over… At long last you will be recognized as the inventor of photography. This picture will prove it to all the world. (On his discovery of the first photograph, made by Joseph NicГ©phore NiГ©pce.)

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

The truths of the Scriptures are so marked and inimitable, that the inventor would be more of a miraculous character than the hero.

My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.

Some sad news from Australia… the inventor of the boomerang grenade died today.

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity – romantic love and gunpowder.

Congress shall have Power . . . to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

As the inventor of MyPillow, I have been a proponent of American-made products for decades.

As single-mom female inventor, there was no path for that, so really I don’t think people took me seriously for a really long time. Certainly the Miracle Mop being my first successful product, people started to pay attention, and I guess now they really pay attention.

These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

The notion that inventors are anorak-wearing crackpots with glasses held together with Sellotape is beguiling but wrong.

The greatest inventors are unknown to us. Someone invented the wheel – but who?

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

It is easy to see that the inventor of the heaven did not originate the idea, but copied it from the show-ceremonies of some sorry little sovereign State up in the back settlements of the Orient somewhere.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.

[Buckminster Fuller] was quite a Newtonian in certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people on their toes.

What man-made machine will ever achieve the complete perfection of even the goose‘s wing?

CALVIN: When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I’ll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.

I decided I could develop a toy and get some revenue from that and then use that revenue to really become an inventor and work on some of the more challenging projects I had in mind.

It is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

I’m first and foremost a biological explorer. I’ve looked all over the world for answers. Secondly, I’m an ecological designer, and by that I mean I attempt to work with constellations of nature to create technological forms. So I’m part engineer, part ecologist, part inventor, really.

If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.

IF PARENTS PASS ENTHUSIASM ALONG TO THEIR CHILDREN, THEY WILL LEAVE THEM AN ESTATE OF INCALCULABLE VALUE

It isn’t easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can’t be fixed. –Hephaestus

I never did a day’s work in my life, it was all fun.

The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.

Inventors don’t have time for married life.

You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

Today, people idolize athletes and celebrities – and yes, highly successful and visionary business people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but not the innovators who perhaps have not seen such high-flying levels of success. Can anyone name the inventors of GPS, which has such a huge impact on our lives today?

I spend my money on my props and my creations. I’m an inventor.

We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors. Because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours.

I have far more respect for the person with a single idea who gets there than for the person with a thousand ideas who does nothing.

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….’

We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.

A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

It’s very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable – broadly, that’s a good thing – in the case of patents, many that own them aren’t in a good position to take the next step.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

The US patent system adds the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things

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

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

I’m wary of the word ‘inventing,’ because in the British psyche the word ‘inventor’ is immediately linked with ‘mad’. For me, inventing is problem-solving.

In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.

Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes.

There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There’s no single answer – not even a single starting point. Even the ‘teachers‘ … don’t offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven‘t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

You can be anything. You could be the President of the United States or the inventor of the next Internet or a ninja cardio-thoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome because you would be the first one.

I’ve always been a bit of an inventor, just making up weird things people haven’t thought of before. I can’t tell you exactly what, though, because they might actually happen one day!

The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.

American Inventor’, a show I came up with launched in 2006. It’s all of America’s greatest and wackiest inventions rolled into one with a judging panel including the legendary George Foreman.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Spanx are amazing. Thank you to the inventor of that.

There is the sheer amount of Franklin‘s wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation’s leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

An inventor creates something that works. An entrepreneur creates something that others will buy.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.

I’ve inherited the bad poetry genes, but not the inventor genes.

I’m the laziest inventor you ever met. My inventing is in my head – I don’t have to be in the lab working and sweating.

You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me. They’re shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.

I can’t recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open – any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

The political hero is not like the sports champion or matinee idol or daring inventor; like the war hero, he is born only of tragedy.

Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.

Every child has a dream, to pursue the dream is in every child’s hand to make it a reality. One’s invention is another‘s tool.

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

I would consider myself an inventor at heart, or reinventor.

the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

We should make the poor uncomfortable and kick them out of poverty.

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.

Years ago, Barry Diller asked me to be a judge on a pilot for an inventor show on USA, and when it was over, the producer, Ken Mok, took me out to dinner and really got me talking. It was a long dinner. Afterward, he said, ‘One day, I’m going to write your movie‘.

Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am aware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruit in the hands of its first inventor.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and likes to see us happy.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

When the inventor of the drawing board messed things up, what did he go back to?

I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology.

My dad was an inventor, and I think I’ve always had a rosy view of technology, or at least its potential.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

On August 30, 1982, I get issued a copyright officially recognizing me as the inventor of e-mail.

Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

Something I’ll always remember – when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that’s kinda wild when you think about it.

If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.

I don’t think we use television the way we should or the way the inventors intended.

I’m an inventor.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

You can’t name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

I used to be an amateur inventor when I was a kid; I’m always inventing something.

I’m never proud of myself. No. People are always proud of me, but I think people can always be greater than me. People call me great; I don’t think that I’m great. But they say, “You are the inventor for the word reggae, you are great.” And I have to say, “Okay, thank you.”

I am an inventor of music.

Interestingly enough after diving to 235 feet in Saba, I visited the Virgin Islands. There, as a pure Karmic coincidence, I met the inventor of the snowboard, Steve Sanders, Mr. Burton’s brother.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

There is no substitute for hard work.

All inventors, they say, are a little mad. I reckon that only completely sane people are willing to admit they are slightly crazy.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

No one is an inventor in the fashion business. Designers recreate fashion.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

PYRRHONISM- An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that.

If you are an inventor, then you are destined for blood, sweat and tears.

When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.’

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.

The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains

Wherever you may find the inventor, you may give him wealth or you may take from him all that he has; and he will go on inventing. He can no more help inventing that he can help thinking or breathing.

Don’t be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don’t follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it’s enough.

Being an independent inventor is tough. You develop a product, patent it, then you’re looking for someone who will see the benefit from this technology. You assume all the investment and all the risk. It can be a challenge.

An inventor’s path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

I’ve been an amature inventor for a long time.

There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.

We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.

I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.

Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.

I actually think we need to put our energies, as entrepreneurs, as technology inventors, as government, to being much more inclusive. I think the key thing is actually working together.

I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantitГ© negligeable.

Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly “forgot it” and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.

A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?

I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn’t just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn’t the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye.

I thought I wanted to be an inventor but then discovered you couldn’t study inventing!

I don’t know if I know anyone, with the exception of the early inventors of rock music [who wasn’t influenced by something].

My father was a brilliant inventor and businessman. He taught me to appreciate the opportunities that America offers to innovators.

An inventor is one who can see the applicability of means to supply demand five years before it is obvious to those skilled in the art.

Which was why, some six hours later, Alexia Maccon’s daughter was born inside the head of an octomaton in the presence of her husband, a comatose werewolf dandy, and a French inventor.

I want to be an inventor in the real sense.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.

All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

The first devices to record and play back music were the phonograph and the gramophone. The gramophone’s inventor: Alexander Graham Bell.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

My father, a former Air India official, but essentially an inventor at heart – a man who loved to sometimes break machines just so that he could have the joy of re-engineering them – was a twinkly-eyed, ever-optimistic man of science.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

The way to fly is to go straight up . . . Such a machine (the helicopter) will never compete with the aeroplane, though it will have specialized uses, and in these it will surpass the aeroplane. The fact that you can land at your front door is the reason you can’t carry heavy loads efficiently.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

I love my life. I love being an inventor.

Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.

Don’t settle, as with all matters of the heart you’ll know when you find it

I’m an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

My father was a watchmaker and an inventor. I saw him working in the house every day. The work ethic, I got from him. He worked hard and he never complained about it.

Math is discovered. To be invented requires an inventor, but math exists outside of humanity. But ultimately, the laws of the universe will be reduced down to a single equation, perhaps no more than one inch long. But leaves the final question, where did that one inch equation come from?

The journey is the reward

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

I’m not a designer, I’m an inventor.

Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.

We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? Is he not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?

Japan‘s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

An amazing invention – but who would ever want to use one?

You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby.

Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators…not conformists

An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis – man, the inventor of the city – we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.

A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.

Transformation of any kind always exacts a holy tussle. The newborn butterfly struggles to open its wings so it can conjure up the strength to fly. So, too, with artists, inventors, mystics, and entrepreneurs.

Coffee and chocolate-the inventor of mocha should be sainted.

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer world.

It is no monopoly in any other sense than as a man’s own house is a monopoly. But a man’s right to his own invention is a very different matter. It is no more a monopoly for him to possess that, than to possess his own homestead .