Inventing Quotes - Page 8

• I think there’s no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It’s like inventing something, but it’s invisible, you know? It’s weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that’s the joy. It’s like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they’re your kids.

  Jason Mraz

  Song, Kids, Thinking

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• To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.

  John H. Lienhard

  Memories, Mean, Science

  John H. Lienhard (2006). “How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines”, p.227, Oxford University Press

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• Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Book, Feelings

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.289, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

  William Kittredge

  Art, War, Believe

  William Kittredge (2002). “Owning It All: Essays”, Graywolf Pr

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• Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Issues, Hollies, Identity

  Interview with TashaR, www.avclub.com. November 13, 2002.

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• To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you're inventing a world, you're inventing characters. If they're interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for five more episodes. How incredibly frustrating would it be to just do one movie?

  Melissa Rosenberg

  Character, Two, Interesting

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• I certainly can't complain. I work six days a week, if not seven, and eighteen hours out of twenty-four - fortunately, with a great deal of pleasure. Why? Because I only do something if I want to do it; I need to feel a desire, to find pleasure in moving forward, creating, moving, inventing.

  Alber Elbaz

  Moving, Creating, Desire

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• I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Cutting, Reality, Thinking

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• We cannot step aside and say that we have achieved our goal by inventing a new drug or a new way by which to treat presently incurable diseases, a new way to help those who suffer from malnutrition, or the creation of ideal balanced diets on a worldwide scale. We cannot rest till the way has been found, with our help, to bring our finest achievement to everyone.

  George W. Bush

  Science, Medicine, Goal

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• We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Philosophy, Fall, Men

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• In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Self, Miracle, Mirages

  Douglas R. Hofstadter (2008). “I Am a Strange Loop”, p.363, Basic Books

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• They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Wings, Mind, Links

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• Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

  David Antin

  Real, Ideas, Made

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• But, said Alice, the the world has absolutely no sens, who's stopping us from inventing one?

  Lewis Carroll

  Stopping, World, Said

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• Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.

  Euripides

  Grief, Wine, Sleep

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1958). “The complete Greek tragedies”

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• By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

  Tim O'Brien

  Stories, Facts, Helping

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.152, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich dies zusammen). What a delight this is I cannot tell ! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Dream, Imagination, Delight

  "Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart".

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• The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

  Francois Jacob

  Real, Ignorance, Race

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• One major problem with any science is that people who don't know the conceptual history of their field go round re-inventing the elliptical wheel.

  Walter M. Fitch

  Science, People, Research

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• If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

  C. S. Lewis

  Simple, People, Simplicity

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.126, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.

  Dan Barker

  Religion, Wish, Atheism

  Dan Barker (2009). “Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists”, p.108, Ulysses Press

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• There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

  Carl Sagan

  Pain, Wonder, Injury

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.89, Ballantine Books

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• We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.

  Carl Sagan

  Real, Quality, Stories

  Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.173, Simon and Schuster

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• 'Do you know,' he asked in a delicious accent, 'what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?' 'No?' I said. 'He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars!'

  John Green

  Stars, Wine, Monk

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• It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

  Virginia Woolf

  Differences, People, Heaven

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.7, Tyché

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