Quotes by Inventors - Page 5

When you talk to a sympathetic mind about technology, gender, age, and experience disappear completely, and soon you’re one-on-one with the topic at hand.
Carmelo S. "Nino" Amarena
Sensing my delight at seeing his laptop, Tom asked me, "William, have you ever seen the Internet?""No."In a quiet conference room, Tom sat me down at his computer and explained the track pad, how the motion of my fingers guided the arrow on the screen."This is Google," he said. "You can find answers to anything. What do you want to search for?""Windmill."In one second, he'd pulled up five million page results-pictures and models of windmills I'd never even imagined.
William Kamkwamba
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
Steve Jobs
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.
Steve Jobs
I wish to be buried in Ireland, the country of my adoption a country which I loved, which I have dutifully served, and for which I believe I have sacrificed my life.
Thomas Drummond
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
Elon Musk
Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses.
George Washington Carver
Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.
Henry Ford
Although we look at ourself as One, in the real world we always experience ourself as TWO.
Joey Lawsin
I haven't failed,I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.
Henry Ford
genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration
Thomas Edison
The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.
R. Buckminster Fuller
How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
Christiaan Huygens
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people, and you can change it.
Steve Jobs
If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll be right.
Steve Jobs
Furious activity is no substitute for analytical thought.
Alastair Pilkington
Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.
Alexander Graham Bell
I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.
Nikola Tesla
A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.[On his inability to keep for himself a profitable income from his invention of the Spinning Mule.]
Samuel Crompton
In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
Lin Yutang
What we accept as reality is primarily a construction of our imagination.
Joey Lawsin
Je me rends parfaitement compte du desagreable effet que produit sur la majorite de l'humanité, tout ce qui se rapporte, même au plus faible dègré, á des calculs ou raisonnements mathematiques.I am well aware of the disagreeable effect produced on the majority of humanity, by whatever relates, even at the slightest degree to calculations or mathematical reasonings.
Hiram Stevens Maxim
If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.
Nikola Tesla
Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.
Thomas A. Edison
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. [BusinessWeek, May 25 1998]
Steve Jobs
Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.
Steve Jobs
Focusing is about saying No.
Steve Jobs
The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.
Nikola Tesla
Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.
Charles Henry Dow
I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book ... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.
Steve Wozniak
All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's no
Steve Wozniak
[It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.
Samuel Morse
The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy
R. Buckminster Fuller
Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.
Arthur C. Clarke
I grant men the land, the government, the wealth, all the chances. I accept that you have to hold all the cards, since that's the only way you know how to play; but I refuse to swallow your disrespect.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
Arthur C. Clarke
There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.
Kōbō Abe
There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head.
Lin Yutang
Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.
Lin Yutang
Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life.
Lin Yutang
Reality - Dreams = Animal BeingReality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)Dreams - Humor = FanaticismDreams + Humor = FantasyReality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.
Ray Kurzweil
Fame is not the glory! Virtue is the goal, and fame only a messenger, to bring more to the fold.
Vanna Bonta
Life is chemistry, not biology.
Joey Lawsin
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
Ray Kurzweil
The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.
Ray Kurzweil
Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insightinto how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics).
Ray Kurzweil
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
Arthur C. Clarke
If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.
Kōbō Abe
When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?
Kōbō Abe
As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
Arthur C. Clarke
Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.
Arthur C. Clarke
My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.
Samuel Morse
Now the soft-voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished, in her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind.
Nikola Tesla
Now the soft-voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished.
Nikola Tesla
For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.
Lin Yutang
How far you go in life depends onyour being tender with the young,compassionate with the aged,sympathetic with the striving andtolerant of the weak and strong.Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
George Washington Carver
90% of all failures in life are those who have the habit of making excuses.
George Washington Carver
We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
Steve Jobs