Ingenuity
Ingenuity is the quality of being clever, original, and inventive, often in the process of applying ideas to solve problems or meet challenges. For example, the process of figuring out how to cross a mountain stream using a fallen log, build an airplane model from a sheet of paper, or start a new company in a foreign culture all involve the exercising of ingenuity. Human ingenuity has led to technological developments through applied science, but can also be seen in the development of new social organizations, institutions and relationships. Ingenuity involves the most complex human thought processes, bringing together our thinking and acting both individually and collectively to take advantage of opportunities or to overcome problems.
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Famous quotes containing the word ingenuity:
“Central heating, French rubber goods, and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man’s ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)
“Bounds should be set
To ingenuity for being so cruel
In bringing change unheralded on the unready.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)