Quote

A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.

Edwin Land

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edwin Land
Age: 81 †
Born: 1909
Born: May 7
Died: 1991
Died: March 1
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Photographer
Physicist
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Edwin Land
Edwin Herbert Land
E.H. Land
Away
Attempt
Something
Explain
Destroy
Seek
Thrills
Increase
Premature
Evidence
Thrill
Rather
Tendency
Science
Tendencies

More quotes by Edwin Land

Image
I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.
Edwin Land
Image
There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
Edwin Land
Image
The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.
Edwin Land
Image
The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.
Edwin Land
Image
I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.
Edwin Land
Image
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.
Edwin Land
Image
Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
Edwin Land
Image
Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
Edwin Land
Image
As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.
Edwin Land
Image
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
Edwin Land
Image
An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
Edwin Land
Image
Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.
Edwin Land
Image
The bottom line is in heaven!
Edwin Land
Image
Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
Edwin Land
Image
The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.
Edwin Land
Image
We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.
Edwin Land
Image
Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.
Edwin Land
Image
[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
Edwin Land
Image
I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.
Edwin Land
Image
You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.
Edwin Land