Heraclitus Quotes

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

the discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

One of the main reasons that I love doing what I do is because it's unpredictable and I don't know what's coming next. When you're creating work, it's up to you whether it's an exciting experience or not.

You know, one of the classics when somebody invents something, you go why the hell didn't I think of that.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

Many of the things that have happened in the laboratory have happened in ways it would have been impossible to foresee, but not impossible to plan for in a sense. I do not think Dr. Whitney deliberately plans his serendipity but he is built that way; he has the art-an instinctive way of preparing himself by his curiosity and by his interest in people and in all kinds of things and in nature, so that the things he learns react on one another and thereby accomplish things that would be impossible to foresee and plan.

My genius is in my nostrils.

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.

Surprise is where creativity comes in.

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.

Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five