Thoughts on inventions

An inventor is a person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilisation.
—Ambrose Bierce

I form the light and create darkness; I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.
—Isaiah 45:7

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
—Agatha Christie

From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know... more we have learnt primarily by tinkering.
—Curt Gabrielson

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
—Thomas Edison

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way... They think I am a non-person, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery.
—Rube Goldberg

Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising. See from their chimneys how tall the flame-fires stream.
—Walt Whitman

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
—Mary Shelley

They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.
—Lauren Willig

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.
—Matthew b Crawford

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone. We must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.
—Sebastian Barry

Imagination provides the wings for life’s airplanes; work, the motor.
—BC Forbes

Image - Ambrose: Courtesy: J.H.E. Partington; Library of Congress; Agatha: Getty Images; Thomas, Walt: Shutterstock.Com; Sebastian: Stephen Hird / Reuters