Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
The invention of basketball was not an accident. It was developed to meet a need.
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.
I never have trouble keeping fact and invention straight.
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.
An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God. . . . Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.
Faith is a fine invention When gentlemen can see, But microscopes are prudent In an emergency.
Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.
The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.
And many such good inventions are there, that they are like woman's breasts: useful at the same time, and pleasant.
The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.
Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them