Donald Cram Quotes

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.

As I see it, whoever's doing the inventing is also doing most of the learning - and probably having most of the fun.

The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. 'Who, what, where, why, when, and how!' They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

That's the nice thing about doing research. Whatever you do is novel, so you always have this sense of novelty, even if you are only using a new gadget.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

I'm into creating something that I've never created before.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

I'm naturally curious, and I've always been driven by my curiosity. Curiosity gets people excited. Curiosity leads to new ideas, new jobs, new industries.

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious about doing something new, we'd never have made a lot of the progress we have.

The best ideas come out of getting lost.

A lot of times, you think of things as being science fiction, but the creation of the ideas makes you want to solve them. Then, in solving them, they give us greater capability.

The core of what we're doing is, we're playing with the world. And our curiosity in doing that is what we are most proud of and what we like to put out there.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab.

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.

I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.