Inventive Genius Quotes

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood.

Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether relatively to the larger size of his body, in comparison with that of woman, has not, I believe been fully ascertained. In woman the face is rounder; the jaws and the base of the skull smaller; the outlines of her body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an earlier age than man.

Men of genius are like eagles, they live on what they kill, while men of talents are like crows, they live on what has been killed for them.

The source of genius is imagination alone.

The inventions of a nation are closely connected with the freedom of its people … Inventors must not only possess full freedom to exercise their powers, but there must also be a certain welcome and protection to their ideas. Deprived, as woman is, of political power, she has to face contempt of her sex, open and covert scorn of womanhood, deprecatory allusions to her intellectual powers,—all tending to hamper the expression of her inventive genius.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

To the Caucasian race is the world indebted for all the great and important discoveries, inventions, and improvements, that have been made in the arts and sciences.

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.

I have oft-times been besought, by divers gentlemen, to set down on paper what I have beheld through my newly invented microscopia, but I have generally declined.

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.

Of all the detestable American drinks on which our inventive genius has exercised itself, this black-strap was truly the most outrageous

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

Scotland almost invented the modern world. I mean, all of these televisions, telephones, penicillin, we all - all of these things were invented in Scotland.

His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.

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

We are living in a time when the comforts of life, and all the material wealth needed to bring happiness to every human being, can be produced in abundance. There is no need whatever for one human being to go hungry, homeless or naked. Man’s inventive genius has developed the tool to that point, and guided the natural forces to that degree, that abundance is possible to all.

They [formulae 1.10 - 1.12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise