#invention

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question? ↗

— Enrico Bombieri

#inventions #math #perspective #science #science

He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch. ↗

— Dava Sobel

#invention #inventors #science #science

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#individuality #invention #beauty

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

— John Adams

#contrived #country #ever #his #imagination

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought. ↗

— Pierre Bayle

#aptly #author #being #book #first

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure. ↗

— Thomas Edward Brown

#calling #comes #countrymen #field #giving

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#conventional #copyright #day #disguised #distinctive

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. ↗

— Alfred Marshall

#commodities #increased #inventions #labour #man

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute. ↗

— Samuel George Morton

#acute #arts #external #great #great talent

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. ↗

— Duane Michals

#art #invention #nothing #photography #surfaces