Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

Certainly, nothing can be more simple than monotony.

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe.

The character of a true men is found out by his amusements.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Music is not man's invention, but his heritage from the blessed spirits.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

The Internet makes it possible for people like me to live the way I do now. Without it, I'd have to be in New York or some other city. I think the Internet is the greatest invention in history after antibiotics.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

Never keep a line of retreat: it is a wretched invention.

The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

For thirty years, beginning with the invention of a privacy right in the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the Left has been waging a systematic assault on the constitutional foundation of the nation.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

Since the invention of steamships distant countries have become like those that are near at hand.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

Human subtlety 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.

Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of voice, but out of chaos.

I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.