Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

What is there more unruly than the sea, with its winds, its tornadoes, and its tempests? And yet in what department of her works has Nature been more seconded by the ingenuity of man than in this, by his inventions of sails and of oars?

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities.

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

As a medical doctor who chose a career in artificial heart technology rather than clinical practice, I decided not to take an internship, which is required for licensing. Instead, I work with invention, manufacturing, regulatory affairs, and clinical application of artificial hearts.

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.

The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.

To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything.

The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.