Invention quotes
270 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside invention — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Man loves the marvelous. It has an irresistible charm for him. He is always ready to leave that with which he is familiar to pursue vain inventions. He lends himself to his own deception."
"All the arts come from God and are to be respected as divine inventions"
"I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes."
"The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention."
"Compound interest on debt was the banker's greatest invention, to capture, and enslave, a productive society."
"The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves."
"Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration."
"Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from."
"Money is an invention of the marketplace of exchange, brought into being by traders who discovered that a reliable medium could facilitate trades that were more difficult or even impossible by barter alone."
"In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
"Invention is the mother of necessities."
"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."
"No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry."
"I think the FDIC was one of the great inventions of the American."
"The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius."
"Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"
"For without invention, no one was ever a great man in his own trade."
"Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?"
"The Book of the science of Mechanics must precede the Book of useful inventions."
"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."
