60 Engineering Quotes That Inspire Innovation

These inspiring engineering quotes from the minds of engineers, inventors, and scientists just might spark inspiration for your next project.

Where would the world be without engineers?

Without engineers, we would be living in a world that is unrecognizable to us today. We’d basically be cave people living in the wild.

Engineers are problem solvers and innovators who take the world’s biggest challenges and create ways to improve our daily lives. Their solutions to the world’s problems have saved lives and improved our quality of living!

We hope these engineering quotes will inspire you, make you laugh, and maybe even motivate you to find a solution to a problem you’re facing in your life. Enjoy!

Don’t forget to also check out these science quotes from famous scientists about life and death.

Funny engineering quotes and sayings

1. “Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.” — Scott Adams

2. “The problem in this business isn’t to keep people from stealing your ideas; it’s making them steal your ideas!” — Howard Aiken

3. “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.” — Unknown

4. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” — Douglas Adams

5. “Normal people believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.” — Scott Adams

6. “To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.” — Unknown

7. “An engineer is someone who is good with figures, but doesn’t have the personality of an accountant.” — An Arts graduate’s view of engineers

8. “Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.” — John Prebble

9. “An engineer is someone who washes his hands before going to the toilet.” — Unknown

10. “Engineers have more words for screwing up than the Inuit have words for snow.” — Pierce Nichols

Short engineering quotes

11. “Math is my Passion. Engineering is my Profession.” — Wilfred James Dolor

12. “I have not failed, but found 1000 ways to not make a light bulb.” — Thomas Edison

13. “One has to watch out for engineers – they begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.” — Marcel Pagnol

14. “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” — Winston Churchill

15. “Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.” — Theodore von Karman

16. “The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history.” — James Kip Finch

17. “Knowing there is a structure, hidden or felt, to the random gives pleasure.” — Cecil Balmond

18. “One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.” — Robert A. Heinlein

19. “The scientist discovers a new type of material or energy and the engineer discovers a new use for it.” — Gordon Lindsay Glegg

Motivational engineering quotes

20. “Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.” — Sir Henry Royce

21. “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” — Steven Johnson

22. “Kobak explained, ‘The way you learn anything is that something fails, and you figure out how not to have it fail again.” — Robert S. Arrighi

23. “There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.” — Bill Nye

24. “What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems… there’s no law of physics preventing them.” — Michio Kaku

25. “I take the vision which comes from dreams and apply the magic of science and mathematics, adding the heritage of my profession and my knowledge of nature’s materials to create a design.” — Unknown

26. “Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention.” — Yuan-Cheng Fung

Inspirational engineering quotes about life

27. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

28. “When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” — William Gibson

29. “Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life.” — Prakhar Srivastav

30. “Projects we have completed demonstrate what we know – future projects decide what we will learn.” — Dr. Mohsin Tiwana

31. “The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.” — Donald P. Coduto

32. “There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there’s always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work.” — Edith Clarke

33. “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.” — Douglas Adams

Other famous engineering quotes

34. “The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” — Leonardo da Vinci

35. “I’ve never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn’t be done better by fifty people.” — C. Gordon Bell

36. “First rule of engineering; beware prototypes. Along with, avoid anything made by an engineer who doesn’t have all his own fingers.” — Simon R. Green

37. “Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering as well as final assembly.” — James Dyson

38. “It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.” — Hans Y. Tammemagi

39. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” — Elon Musk

40. “A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.” — Freeman Dyson

41. “It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it’s all can openers.” — Neal Stephenson

42. “Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer.” — British Engineer to the Royal Aeronautical Society, 1922.

43. “ A great bridge is a great monument which should serve to make known the splendour and genius of a nation; one should not occupy oneself with efforts to perfect it architecturally, for taste is always susceptible to change, but to conserve always in its form and decoration the character of solidity which is proper.” — Jean Peronnet

44. “Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.”

45. “Engineering refers to the practice of organizing the design and construction [and, I would add operation] of any artifice which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognized need.” — G.F.C. Rogers

46. “Engineering … to define rudely but not inaptly, is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.” — Arthur Mellen Wellington

47. “From the laying out of a line of a tunnel to its final completion, the work may be either a series of experiments made at the expense of the proprietors of the project, or a series of judicious applications of the results of previous experience.” — H.S. Drinker

48. “Go for civil engineering, because civil engineering is the branch of engineering which teaches you the most about managing people. Managing people is a skill which is very, very useful and applies almost regardless of what you do.” — Sir John Harvey Jones

49. “No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other peoples money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness that flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.” — Herbert Hoover

50. “When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road.” — Ove Arup

Engineering quotes about what engineering is

51. “Engineering stimulates the mind.” — Bruce Dickinson

52. “Architecture begins where engineering ends.” — Walter Gropius

53. “Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.” — Henry Petroski

54. “Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.” — P. J. O’Rourke

55. “A country without engineering skill and knowledge will never become a developed country.” — Mahathir Mohamad

56. “In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.” — Neri Oxman

57. “At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.” — Queen Elizabeth II

58. “We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.” — Katherine Johnson

59. “To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.” — Elon Musk

60. “With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code.” — Stephen Hawking

What did you learn from these engineering quotes?

If you looked around your house, it would be pretty dang hard to find something that wasn’t made better by an engineer.

Safe drinking water, working plumbing, electricity, heating and cooling in your home — all things you have an engineer to thank for! Everything down to the milk and cereal in your breakfast bowl were brought to you by an engineer. Pretty crazy, right?

It’s amazing how the minds of these innovators have affected every aspect of our daily lives.

We hope you enjoyed these engineering quotes and sayings. Let us know your favorite quote in the comments below!