Ingenuity Quotes - Page 7

• Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured.

  Christine de Pizan

  War, Believe, Skills

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• In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Eye, Science, Research

  Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1989). “Recollections of My Life”, p.576, MIT Press

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• It's still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth's innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.

  Harold McGee

  Maturity, Ice Cream, Meditation

  Harold McGee (2007). “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• I reject the peak oil theory insofar as it refers to technological limits on human ingenuity.

  Robert P. Murphy

  Oil, Limits, Theory

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• I like a woman who has both maturity and ingenuity. This comes under the heading of femininity.

  Laurence Harvey

  Maturity, Femininity, Headings

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• Unless there exist peculiar institutions for the support of such inquirers, or unless the Government directly interfere, the contriver of a thaumatrope may derive profit from his ingenuity, whilst he who unravels the laws of light and vision, on which multitudes of phenomena depend, shall descend unrewarded to the tomb.

  Charles Babbage

  Science, Light, Government

  Charles Babbage (1830). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes”, p.19

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• If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there's nothing to be afraid of. That's the sappy part of it, ... On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my 'Ghostbusters' jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts.

  Harold Ramis

  Halloween, Kids, Hands

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• Peter Hyland's poems are both elegantly wrought and meditatively wild. They testify to an original, restless intelligence. He can cast his imagination into a woman's dress, the mind of a grasshopper, or into the glass eyeballs of a buffalo head mounted on the wall of a home in suburban Texas to contemplate 'man's tireless ingenuity.'

  Tony Hoagland

  Wall, Home, Men

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• The Spaniards are perfectly right to govern these barbarians of the New World and adjacent islands; they are in prudence, ingenuity, virtue, and humanity as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women are to men, there being as much difference between them as that between wild and cruel and very merciful persons, the prodigiously intemperate and the continent and tempered, and I daresay from apes to men

  Juan Gines de Sepulveda

  Children, Men, Differences

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• Perhaps today there is a greater kindness of tone, as there is greater ingenuity of expression to make up for the fact that all the real, solid, elemental jests against doctors were uttered some one or two thousand years ago.

  Charles Loomis Dana

  Kindness, Real, Doctors

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• POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific-and without science we are as the snakes and toads.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Country, Drinking, Science

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2484, Delphi Classics

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• The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Art, Science, Law

  Alfred North Whitehead (1939). “An introduction to mathematics”

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• The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty- four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves....Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it.

  Philipp Melanchthon

  Honesty, Moving, Eye

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• Watch human nature; we are so built that if we do not get thrilled in the right way, we will get thrilled in the wrong. If we are without the thrill of communion with God, we will try to get thrilled by the devil, or by some concoction of human ingenuity.

  Oswald Chambers

  Trying, Devil, Watches

  Oswald Chambers (2015). “Biblical Ethics / The Moral Foundations of Life / The Philosophy of Sin: Ethical Principles for the Christian Life”, p.242, Discovery House

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• The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

  Brendan Gill

  Summer, Morning, Order

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

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• Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

  William James

  Teacher, Art, Teaching

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.16, Harvard University Press

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• As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Everyday, Let It Go, Pennies

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook B 33, 1799.

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• System uptime, data protection, and identity theft are weighty issues. It takes real ingenuity to out-think the fraudsters who are trying to steal identities and hack into enterprise systems. The 12 smart companies that debuted security solutions today at DEMO have designed serious, and seriously clever, innovations.

  Chris Shipley

  Clever, Real, Smart

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• Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

  Darren Walker

  Opportunity, Cities, America

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• "You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy their heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his his resourcefulness."

  Stephen Covey

  Leadership, Sports, Loyalty

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• The view... from my apartment... was the World Trade Center... and now it's gone, they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity, and strength, and labor, and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what? You know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the South of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that!

  Jon Stewart

  Views, Imagination, Liberty

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• Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

  Ronald Fisher

  Data, Issues, Tasks

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• War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.

  Storm Jameson

  Strong, War, Men

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Company Parade”, p.230, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Loyalty, Sports, Boxing

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• We need to put our faith and trust in the people on the frontlines -- and back it up with real resources. We need to make sure first defenders have the gear and support they need, and the benefits and protections they've earned. With new technology and ingenuity, by doing more to sustain our first defenders and calling on Americans to do more for their country, we can make our country stronger, safer, and more secure.

  John F. Kerry

  Country, Real, Technology

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