Tinkering Quotes

“From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.”

“If you tell somebody something, you've forever robbed them of the opportunity to discover it for themselves.”

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.”

“Black holes are the last vestige of civilizations obsessed with tinkering.”

“[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.”

“We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.”

“For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...”

“Starting early and getting girls on computers, tinkering and playing with technology, games and new tools, is extremely important for bridging the gender divide that exists now in computer science and in technology.”

“I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer.”

“Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.”