The alphabet is the most important of all inventions. [ J. Cauvin ]

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions,
Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions. [ Lowell ]

Human Inventions are no essential parts of divine worship. [ Proverb ]

Take the advice of a faithful friend, and submit thy inventions to his censure. [ Thomas Fuller ]

The inventions dictated by necessity are of the earlier date than those of pleasure. [ Cicero ]

The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. [ Emerson ]

The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold by far the most excellent place among human actions. [ Bacon ]

On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, that of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. [ T. B. Macaulay ]

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself. [ Buffon ]

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times, Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. [ Emerson ]

In most old communities there is a commonsense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. [ Whipple ]

Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould, about the roots of their vines, procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light. [ Bacon ]