36 Quotes On Invention

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on invention.
“…to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know” — Sir Francis Bacon
“To understand is to invent.” — Jean Piaget
“Inventing is a skill that some people have and some people don’t. But you can learn how to invent.” — Ray Dolby
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success.” — Nikola Tesla
“Doubt is the father of invention.” – Galileo Galilei
“Want is the mistress of invention” – Susanna Centlivre
“Necessity, the mother of invention” – Richard Franck
“Mothers are the necessity of invention.” – Bill Watterson
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.” – Agatha Christie
“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.” — Mark Twain
“I never did anything worth doing by accident; nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work” – Thomas Alva Edison
“Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” – Thomas Alva Edison
“Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth.” – James Dyson
“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.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“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.” – Leonardo DaVinci
“Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles—he can only discover them.” — Thomas Paine
“All creation is a mine, and every man a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself … are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.” — Abraham Lincoln
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” — Thomas Alva Edison
“Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.” — Charles F. Kettering
“Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.” — Igor Stravinsky
“No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” – Edward Hopper
“Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.’ — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I invent nothing, I rediscover.” – Auguste Rodin
“Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing” – Joshua Reynolds
“I invented nothing new. I simply combined the inventions of others into a car. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed.’ — Henry Ford
“Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison’s inventions” – Ernest Dimnet
“I’m an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.” – Ray Kurzweil
“An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.” — Edwin Herbert Land
“Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.” — Ambrose Bierce
“Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried” – Thomas Jefferson
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” — Karl Marx
“We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” — John Stuart Mill
“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people’s lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world” – Margaret Mead
“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.” — William Blake
“Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.” — Lawrence George Durrell
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31 Quotes By Andy Warhol

 
Here’s a collection of quotes by Andy Warhol.
“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.” – Andy Warhol
“Art is what you can get away with.” ― Andy Warhol
“I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, “Well, what do you love most?” That’s how I started painting money.” – Andy Warhol
“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” – Andy Warhol
“Success is when the checks don’t bounce.” – Andy Warhol
“I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work,’ because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.” – Andy Warhol
“I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” ― Andy Warhol
“You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand because those are the only good things.” ― Andy Warhol
“I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” – Andy Warhol
“Beauty is a sign of intelligence.” ― Andy Warhol
“Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.” ― Andy Warhol
“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.” – Andy Warhol
“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” ― Andy Warhol
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol
“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.” ― Andy Warhol
“And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.” ― Andy Warhol
“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” ― Andy Warhol
“Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.” – Andy Warhol
“When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.” – Andy Warhol
“It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.” ― Andy Warhol
“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.” – Andy Warhol
“The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.” – Andy Warhol
“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.” – Andy Warhol
“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” – Andy Warhol
“Publicity is like eating peanuts. Once you start you can’t stop.” – Andy Warhol
“Pop art is for everyone.” – Andy Warhol
“The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.” –
Andy Warhol
“I like boring things.” ― Andy Warhol
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” – Andy Warhol
“I am a deeply superficial person.” – Andy Warhol
“I like to be the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place. Being the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it because something interesting always happens.” ― Andy Warhol
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My Recommended Reading Lists

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Looking for good books? Browse my Recommended Reading lists.
Topics include …
Creativity, Color, Graphic Design, Digital Photography, Photography Appreciation, Photography Theory, Photography Business, Important Thoughts, Cultures, Climate Change, Meditation and Journaling.
If you’re looking for great books on these subjects look at these books first.
Yes, these lists are missing some of the  important classics in these fields that are less accessible and require more effort. Essential, clear, actionable – these are the criteria I’ve used for this selection.
These are some of the books that have changed my life. One of them might change yours too.
Enjoy!

17 Quotes By Photographer Aaron Siskind

 
Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by Aaron Siskind.
“As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me.” – Aaron Siskind
“The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience that brings them together.” – Aaron Siskind
“As the saying goes, we see in terms of our education. We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect. And indeed it is socially useful that we agree on the function of objects. But, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that’s your picture.” – Aaron Siskind
“In any art, you don’t know in advance what you want to say – it’s revealed to you as you say it. That’s the difference between art and illustration.” – Aaron Siskind
“I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.” – Aaron Siskind
“As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.” – Aaron Siskind
“The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature.” – Aaron Siskind
“When I make a photograph, I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.” – Aaron Siskind
“First, and emphatically, I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture. The experience itself may be described as one of total absorption in the object. But the object serves only a personal need and the requirements of the picture. Thus, rocks are sculptured forms; a section of common decorated ironwork, springing rhythmic shapes; fragments of paper sticking to a wall, a conversation piece. And these forms, totems, masks, figures, shapes, images must finally take their place in the tonal field of the picture and strictly conform to their space environment. The object has entered the picture in a sense; it has been photographed directly. But it is often unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its original context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.” – Aaron Siskind
“What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.” – Aaron Siskind
“However, I must stress that my own interest is immediate and in the picture. What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making, the relation of that picture to others I have made and, more generally, its relation to others I have experienced.” – Aaron Siskind
“To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.” – Aaron Siskind
“Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews – talking, and listening, and looking, looking. … And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.” – Aaron Siskind
“The start of a photograph is from a previous picture. There is no preconception, rather predisposition (which predisposition includes the camera, lenses and the film with me at the time). I will usually return to a familiar place or one that seems familiar. I stand still or move slowly, feeling things like the impulse of shapes, the direction of lines, the quality of surfaces. I frame with my eye (sometimes with my hands) as the ground glass would frame. Nothing that one could reasonably call thinking is taking place al this stage. The condition is total absorption; the decision (a picture) is spontaneous … Ambiguity may be the clue, there is the material. and there am I intruding my private intent. I know the imminence of the world and experience it with full sensuality; at the same time I am involved with projection of myself as idea. Strong tensions are inevitable, pleasurable and disturbing. Is not the aesthetic optimum order with the tensions continuing?” – Aaron Siskind
“Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.” – Aaron Siskind
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving, what you have caught of film is captured forever… It remembers little things long after you have forgotten everything.” – Aaron Siskind
“If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.” – Aaron Siskind
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25 Quotes On Clarity

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on clarity.
“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” – Francois Gautier
“You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it.” – Alex Morrison
“Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.” – Pericles
“A lack of clarity could put the brakes on any journey to success.” ― Steve Maraboli
“Clarity affords focus.” – Thomas Leonard
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content… it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.” – Rene Daumal
“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what he loves.” – Blaise Pascal
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” – Thomas Szasz
“Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.” – Richard Holloway
“For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity” – Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
“Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.” – Yo-Yo Ma
“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream” – Vincent van Gogh
“Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after that, you just have to put a lot of work in.” – Diane von Furstenberg
“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more – more unseen forms become manifest to him.” – Jalal ad-Din Rumi
“Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.” ― Julian Barnes
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” – Nikola Tesla
“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.” – Karl von Clausewitz
“Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts.” – Marquis de Vauvenargues
“Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
“Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will” – Blaise Pascal
“The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.” – Conan O’Brien
“I look at the human life like an experiment. Every new moment, every new experience, tragic or otherwise, is an opportunity to gain a more accurate perspective and helps lead me to clarity.” – Steve Gleason
“Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?” – Pablo Neruda
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