Engineer Quotes

The men who miss success have two general alibis: 'I'm not a genius' is one; and the other, 'There aren't the opportunities today there used to be'.

Charles M. Schwab

The designs we see in nature are not the result of chance. They rise naturally, spontaneously, because they enhance access to flow…

It is quite possible that the truest and most eloquent art is a successful fusion of both the visible and visionary worlds, each enhancing and reinforcing the other.

In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.

Harold Eugene Edgerton

Successful visionaries start from where they are, what they have, and what their customers have.

Because of our superficial self-awareness, we often wonder where an idea in our heads came from. Some people imagine that these thoughts and feelings come directly from agencies outside their own minds; they incline towards a belief in haunted heads.

K. Eric Drexler

Work is the universal topic; the weather is too serious a subject to chatter about lightly.

Francis Hopkinson Smith

The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe and that it teaches the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind; words, images and ideas.

Analogies are useful for analysis in unexplored fields. By means of analogies an unfamiliar system may be compared with one that is better known. The relations and actions are more easily visualized, the mathematics more readily applied, and the analytical solutions more readily obtained in the familiar system.

The manufacturer of chemicals has all the griefs of a maker of shoes, or bolts and nuts, or ready-to-wear clothes, and has just one more grief in addition — i.e., troubles occurring in chemical transformations.

In general the problems of civil engineers are given to them by God Almighty. They are the problems of nature. On the other hand mechanical and electrical work has problems which man, to a certain extent, has created for himself.

A scientific discovery... doesn't have to please anybody. It just has to be in accordance with nature, and it has to work.

The all-important word to the engineer is WHY, and it is astonishing how few people in the ordinary pursuits of human affairs ever think it worthwhile to trouble themselves about that question, or to make much effort to find out whether the answer suggested will bear analysis.

William Le Roy Emmet

There is an engineering approach to (our) problems. The engineer has an objective. He studies and analyzes the materials with which he has to deal. He acquaints himself with the natural forces which he cannot change, which are more powerful than he is, but to which he must adapt himself so that he may make use of them.

Modern science constitutes a method for understanding and modifying the world but has no inherent direction, whereas modern religion describes a messianic world view but lacks a useful method to bring about this state of affairs.

Frederick Grinnell

It is easier to distinguish between the "scientific function" and the "engineering function" than to distinguish between the man who should be called a scientist and [he] who should be termed an engineer. Many men perform both functions, and do it very well.

William Littell Everitt

Engineering drawings are expressed in a graphic language, the grammar and syntax of which are learned through use; it also has idioms that only initiates will recognize. And because the drawings are neatly made and produced on large sheets of paper, they exhume an air of great authority and definitive completeness.

Eugene S. Ferguson

Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a nice air-conditioned office.

I have had no other book than the sky and the earth, which is known to all, and it is given to all to know and read in this beautiful book.... That is why a man who works in the art of the earth is always learning because of unknown natures, and diversity of earths.

Bernard Palissy

Our knowledge must always be limited, but the knowable is limitless. The greater the sphere of our knowledge the greater the surface of contact with our infinite ignorance.

All the efforts of the researcher to find other models, conceptions, different mathematical forms, better linguistic modes of expression, to do justice to newly discovered layers of being mean self-transformation. The researcher in his place is the human being in self-transformation to more profound insight into what is given.

John H. Dessauer

There is an unfailing joy in identifying oneself with the actual sites where great things happened long ago. It appeals to a very human trait in all of us.

Ralph Alger Bagnold

To ordinary minds all creation is mystery; to cultivated minds there is much that is not quite inexplicable.

if tachyons are one day discovered... the day before the momentous occasion a notice from the discoverers should appear in newspapers announcing "tachyons have been discovered tomorrow."

Mathematics higher than the calculus is of small value to the engineer, except possibly as a training for the mind...

John Alexander Low Waddell