Quotes

Here is a collection from our Quotes of the Week.


"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like work." Thomas Edison

 

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.   Brenda Ueland

 

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

 

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.

John W. Gardner (1912 - )

 

"In this Metropolis lived many citizens. Most of them poor, with an additional burden, nowadays it costs more to be poor than it used to."

Puckoon 1963, Spike Milligan (1918 - 2002)

 

A committee is a cul de sac to which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled 
John A. Lincoln

 

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. Norman Podhoretz (1930 - )

 

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams (1957 - ), 'The Dilbert Principle'

 

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

 

 

"Memory feeds imagination."  ....... Amy Tan

 

 

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

 

"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind."

Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986)

 

 

Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur, (1822-1895)

 

 

Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
Edward De Bono

 

 

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

Bill Gates (1955 - ), Business @ The Speed of Thought

 

 

"It's the job of comedians to see life as it is, not as we're told it should be"

Michael Palin (Dec2002, British Comedy Awards)

 

 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919),
"Man in the Arena" Speech given April 23, 1910

 

 

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

 

It is common sense to take a method and try it.
If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.
But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.

Mikhail Gorbachev, (1988)

 

 

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Emerson

 

Today, innovation is not only highly prized; it is regarded by the financial markets as one of the most important drivers of value in an organisation

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (28Oct2002)

 

"A collapse in the chip industry would be the fault of designers failing to innovate"

Robert Payne (Oct 2002)
Chief Technology Officer at Philips Semiconductors

 

 

"We can only compete on the basis of our knowledge, skills and creativity"

Lord Sainsbury
Minister for Science and Innovation (26 September 2002)

 

 

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

Charles Darwin

 

 

The ideal engineer is a composite ... He is not a scientist, he is not a mathematician, he is not a sociologist or a writer; but he may use the knowledge and techniques of any or all of these disciplines in solving engineering problems."

N. W. Dougherty (1955) (University of Tennessee Professor in Civil Engineering)

 

 

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert F. Kennedy, South Africa, 1966

 

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

 

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.            Steven Wright

 

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw

 

Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs?

Spike Milligan, from "The Goon Show"

 

The wisest keeps something of the vision of a child. Though he may understand a thousand things that a child could not understand, he is always a beginner, close to the original meaning of life.

John Macy

 

A coupla months in the laboratory can save a coupla hours in the library.

Westheimer's Discovery

 

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Lord Peter Wimsey, "Gaudy Night"
By: Dorothy L. Sayers ("Yes we understand irony." UK Idea)

 

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.

William James (1842-1910)

 

"The great obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

Daniel J. Boorstin

 

 

"You are not thinking, you're merely being logical."

Neils Bohr (in response to a students comments)

 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

Arthur C. Clarke

 

"Experience ridicules new ideas, meanwhile new ideas change the world"

David Archibald