Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast. Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
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But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stayInvention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studys blows...Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,Fool, said my Muse to me look in thy heart and write.
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I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
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But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.
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All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
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We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - gunpowder and romantic love.
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All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
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The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and the human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A continuation of similar exertions is everyday rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family.
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Of all the inventions that have helped to unify China perhaps the airplane is the most outstanding. Its ability to annihilate distance has been in direct proportion to its achievements in assisting to annihilate suspicion and misunderstanding among provincial officials far removed from one another or from the officials at the seat of government.
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It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, inventions and actions of others.
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Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
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Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.
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All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.
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Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
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The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
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Human subtelty 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.
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Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
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Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
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Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
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This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
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Despair is the mother of inventions.
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Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
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The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
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The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.
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We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
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Fear is a great inventor.
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America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.
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