Engineer Quotes

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
Corrie Ten Boom

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Joseph Stalin

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.
Henry Petroski

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

I am an engineer by profession, but I knew I wanted to act. My parents always encouraged me, and when my father shifted to Mumbai for work for a brief while, I came along.
Kriti Sanon

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.
Herbert Hoover

It’s when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that’s the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

I usually describe myself as an engineer; that’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.
Elon Musk

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.
Neri Oxman

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
Alexander Calder

My dad is a Ghanaian immigrant, and he wanted a son who was an engineer.
Virgil Abloh

Electronics are getting more and more accessible now – you don’t have to be an engineer to start building things.
Simone Giertz

Everything that wasn’t invented by God is invented by an engineer.
Prince Philip

When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.
Will Smith

Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you’ll have an engineer for life.
Bruce Dickinson

We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.
Bjarke Ingels

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
Steve Wozniak

A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks himself about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems he proposes.
Helmut Jahn

You have teenagers thinking they’re going to make millions as NBA stars when that’s not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.
Dean Kamen

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.
Edward Snowden

My dad is a civil engineer, and my mom is a stay-at-home mom. The fact that my parents weren’t really involved in music was kind of good, because it meant that I had something that was private and personal.
Lorde

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.
Paul Rand

When you’re an engineer, you want to analyze things a lot. But if you believe that the most important data points are people, then you have to make conclusions in relatively short order. Because you want to push the people who are doing great. And you want to either develop the people who are not or, in a worst case, they need to be somewhere else.
Tim Cook

My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading ‘The Mysterious Island’ – which I read 25 times as a boy – I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.
Dan Shechtman

I think an engineer has not matured until he or she has conceived of a product and participated in every stage of bringing it to fruition, if that makes sense. And not many engineers get to do all of those stages.
Martin Cooper

From here, it becomes an engineering problem; the engineer considers the ground motion that will occur and evaluates the requirements of the proposed structure in the light of the local foundation conditions.
Charles Francis Richter

 

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be – how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.
Herbert A. Simon

My father is an engineer, and my mother raised the three children.
Yasmine Hamdan

When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.
Herbert Hoover

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I’m an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That’s cool.
James Gosling

I can’t imagine my life without books. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was a public school teacher. Books were an integral part of my childhood.
Randi Weingarten

I left my cushy job as an engineer in New Delhi in 2008 to pursue acting in Mumbai. I figured roles will start pouring in as soon as I landed in the city, but my bubble burst quickly.
Arfi Lamba

Mark Zuckerberg has never really had pressure put on him. He’s an engineer, and he’s created this perfect system that is Facebook, and he’s always been concerned about the internal beauty and logic of this creation that he’s created. I don’t think that the human implications of what he’s created have often been apparent to him.
Franklin Foer

My first book, ‘To Engineer Is Human,’ was prompted by nonengineer friends asking me why so many technological accidents and failures were occurring. If engineers knew what they were doing, why did bridges and buildings fall down? It was a question that I had often asked myself, and I had no easy answer.
Henry Petroski

I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer.
Neil Armstrong

I have always been driven by the ambition to solve every problem I face, whether as a scientist, engineer or entrepreneur.
Martin Winterkorn

My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer’s mind-set: Everything’s kind of a problem; how do you approach the problem?
Bill Keller

I didn’t write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.
Rube Goldberg

I came out of the womb drawing on everything; I used to draw on my mother’s white furniture and her white walls with her red lipstick and my pencils. Little did she know that would later materialize into me doing what I do now – I’m a painter as well and a micromechanical engineer.
Aldis Hodge

I believe destiny and hard work go hand in hand. I was studying to be an engineer when my mom and my brother sent my pictures for the Miss India contest. I didn’t even know about it. If that isn’t destiny, what is?
Priyanka Chopra

I was working as a software engineer in Infosys. I quit because I lost interest in it. I had a group of friends who wanted to make it big in films, and that’s when the audition for ‘Malarvady Arts Club’ happened. I got selected, and it opened the doors to my dream world.
Nivin Pauly

I put a lot of weight on feelings and am weirdly in touch with them, which is not typical for an engineer.
Luis von Ahn

My dad was an electrical engineer.
John Cooper Clarke

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you’re ready to engineer.
Kent Beck

I can’t stop watching ‘Pan Am.’ When I was growing up, my father worked as an engineer in Turkey, and we always flew Pan Am. The stewardesses were so glamorous! When they gave me a set of those golden wings, I felt very grown-up. Not only is the show’s plot full of mystery and infidelity, they get the period details just right.
Gayle King

I was one of the first practitioners of social engineering as a hacking technique, and today it is my only tool of use, aside from a smartphone – in a purely white hat sort of way. But if you don’t trust me, then ask any reasonably competent social engineer.
John McAfee

My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he’d tell me stories about the happy hours he’d organize.
Alec Berg

There’s a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We’re asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool – if you happen to be a software engineer.
Alan Cooper

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.
James Cameron

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
Elon Musk

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.
Aileen Lee

Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study.
Henry Petroski

 

If I had one singular galvanizing ambition in life, I would try to reverse engineer toward it, but I don’t.
Chelsea Clinton

If you want to make your children a successful doctor, engineer or a sportsperson then you will have to put in double the hard work than that of your children.
Milkha Singh

My undergraduate years at the University of Nebraska were a special time in my life: the combination of partying and intellectual awakening that is what the undergraduate years are supposed to be. I went to the university with the goal of becoming an engineer; I had no concept that one could pursue science as a career.
Alan J. Heeger

Nobody just leaves medical school, especially given it’s fiercely competitive to get in. But I had a sister who was a doctor, another who was a pharmacist, a brother who was an engineer. So my parents already had sensible children who would be able to make an actual living, and I think they felt comfortable sacrificing their one strange child.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can’t tell you.
Charles M. Schwab

After I changed the string we picked up right where we left off – and punched back in at the same time. I don’t know if this has ever been done before. The engineer sort of looked at us weird, but we got it on the first take.
Stevie Ray Vaughan

Some people would say, ‘Nah, he’s just a YouTube kid.’ But I sing, play instruments; I can mix, master, and engineer – all those stuff.
William Singe

I’ve never thought of myself as a female engineer or founder or a woman in tech. I just think of myself as someone who’s passionate.
Leah Busque

And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn’t actually have to do my engineer – I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.
Ginni Rometty

And one of the things that I learned was you can’t generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can’t think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.
Geraldine Brooks

My big sister’s an engineer, my oldest brother is a lecturer at Cambridge University, another is a kidney specialist, another is an engineer, one set up his own business, my other sister’s training to be a teacher and there’s me wanting to be a presenter.
A. J. Odudu

You have to get out of your comfort zone in order to grow. And as an actor, you don’t become Meryl Streep by doing the same type of comedy. You get there by being challenged. And unfortunately, there’s a lack of roles for women of color, so you actually have to be the engineer creating some of those roles.
Octavia Spencer

I’m a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm, so I like practical hardware – somebody’s elegant solution that proves itself over the long term.
Chris Hadfield

The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you’re an engineer that has given his life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name to it.
Tim Cook

Bobby is really the one who did all the editing on that stuff. And he did all the mixing. I particularly like the record we did with Logic because Scott Harding did a great job mixing it. He’s really a killing engineer.
Charlie Hunter

I did all sorts of things that you wouldn’t normally find on an engineer’s docket, but it made an educated person out of me.
Frances Arnold

My father was an air conditioning engineer and we lived in a three-bedroom terraced house in Langley before moving to a four-bedroom house in Maidenhead, where my parents still live.
Peter Jones

When you are born and brought up in Udupi, you end up as a doctor or an engineer. Else you are thought to be a dull head. I had to complete my engineering and worked in the IT industry for a few years to get myself the financial support to pursue my dream of acting.
Rakshit Shetty

Relationships are hard. If as an actor you marry an engineer or a doctor, it’s really hard for them because they don’t understand what your life is like. We live two lives. We have a ‘reel’ life and a real life.
Ranbir Kapoor

Instead of becoming an engineer like my brother, I moved to New York to be an actor.
Anthony Mackie

I am an engineer and belong to a family of engineers and Cas.
Shefali Zariwala

My father, a mining engineer and colliery manager, gave his brood many advantages not least of which, for me, was his love of singing which gave music a central place in our lives.
James Black

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I’ve done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.
George Saunders

I’m an engineer, not a politician.
Edward Snowden

My perspective comes in part from being a New York black lady, in part from being an engineer. I know I’m smart and have opinions worth being heard.
Ursula Burns

I was a chemical engineer in school. And, randomly, an ex-girlfriend dared me to do a play.
Ato Essandoh

 

I’ll tell you something: my dad was a nuclear engineer and he was really bright, and I’ve always said that because of negotiating at such a young age with my dad, it was really such a gift because I could then negotiate with very difficult personalities – and not end up being the scapegoat. I learned to really pick and choose my battles.
Faith Prince

I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-’70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.
Feisal Abdul Rauf

I’m an engineer.
Eric Yuan

I’ve been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder.
Neal Asher

Good technology is intuitive – the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.
Martin Cooper

I’m an engineer by training.
Frances Arnold

There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music – and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I’ve had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.
Daniel Levitin

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that’s what’s going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.
Paul Di Filippo

I have three siblings. My sister makes music. My older brother is a classical conductor, and my younger brother is a mixing engineer.
Lisa Loeb

As the son of a racing car designer and mechanical engineer, I was exposed to motorsports from day one.
Charlie Kimball

Anybody who ever left Microsoft to Amazon, we could count on them coming back within a year or two, because it’s not a great place to work to do innovative stuff as an engineer.
Steve Ballmer

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Richard Dawkins

I was striving to become an engineer, but something happened that made me think, ‘Maybe I can make games instead.’
Masahiro Sakurai

My father was a trained engineer who got his qualifications at night school.
David Starkey

I feel like Turbo helped me grow. It’s the way we just lock in. His mind is set to where he’ll start making beats to my flow and my sound. He’s not an engineer, but he knows how to record.
Gunna

Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they’re going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that’s better living through bugs.
John Doerr

My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
Sally Ride

I was a civil engineer in Sydney, I liked to re-do old houses.
Bob Christo

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
Octavia E. Butler

Alex Tumay is a recording engineer who works a lot with Young Thug and a load of other rappers, like Quavo. I’m just a fan of his work.
Rex Orange County

I get called lots of things – a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer – and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!
Frances Arnold

I grew up in Zimbabwe and we didn’t have much. My dad worked away for the whole week as an engineer, came back on Friday with his pay and gave the rent money to my mum. He’d put aside money for food and stuff and he’d keep the rest. That’s how Africans lived, but there was enough to go around.
Dereck Chisora

There’ll be creative business leaders but actually, when it comes down to it, they can’t do anything unless they’re part of a collective. Unless they’ve got that wealth creator, that engineer and that work person, that skilled person at the bench to fulfil that idea… they’re nothing.
John McDonnell

In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.
Vint Cerf

Hey, I’m a good software engineer, but I’m not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don’t translate to ‘good design sense’.
Linus Torvalds

I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I’ve always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.
Santiago Calatrava

My dad never decided what he wanted to do; at times he fought in the army, was a teacher, a boxer, a light engineer, and a then a publican. My mum was a traditional housewife and mother. They showed my brother and I unconditional love.
Anthony Browne

I was a flight engineer on my second flight, which is the most senior position a non-American can have aboard the shuttle. We’re the cockpit crew. We fly the vehicle up to space, dock the vehicle to the space station, undock it at the end of the mission, and return it to the ground.
Julie Payette

There is no short-cut to success. Whether you want to be an engineer, a charted accountant or a fashion model you must work hard.
Tanushree Dutta

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany.
Herbert A. Simon

I’m trying to break away from doing covers or from being considered only as a YouTube star. I’m a singer, songwriter, sound engineer, and producer.
William Singe

I’m not even an engineer. I don’t have a college degree; I hire guys with college degrees.
Woody Norris

Juicero is the first company to make cold-pressed juice something that people can make themselves at home. The challenges to design and engineer a press that can deliver 8,000 pounds of force are tremendous.
Yves Behar

I’ve always focused on technology and growth and don’t have the core competency to do liability management – I’m a mechanical engineer.
Tulsi Tanti

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
Frances Arnold

I was the youngest child and the only son. I was expected to shine in academics. It seemed like too big a risk to take up cricket as a career. I thought I had to live up to my family’s expectations. So I chose to be an engineer.
Sushant Singh Rajput

You can’t get a degree at Tisch College. It serves as an amplifier for what your focus is. If you’re an engineer, you can take courses on understanding how to move a river in Africa to bring hydroelectric power to a community.
Jonathan Tisch

As an engineer I’m constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.
James Dyson

I did not want to be an engineer or be in information technology, and my parents were supportive of my decision.
Roshni Nadar

I remember spending evenings looking at the sky with my dad, who was interested. He was a civil engineer and was interested in science as a kid. And he always encouraged me.
Sandra Faber

‘Product life’ is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a ‘product,’ understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.
Michael Gerber

While my mother wanted me to be a musician, I wanted to become an electronic engineer.
A. R. Rahman

Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off – not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.
Daniel Lyons

If you are a woman, you might feel torn between logical agreement and emotional resistance. Why? It seems like a simpler solution to blame men for the pay gap than to engineer your own bridge to higher pay.
Warren Farrell

We need to eliminate hate speech. We need to do our part to really engineer kindness on our digital platforms.
Whitney Wolfe Herd

I’m an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers… They use my tools.
Robert Moog

I scientifically engineer my music to be as accessible as possible.
John Mayer

I’m definitely going back to school to be a computer engineer.
Andre Drummond

I’m a recording studio guy, an engineer, a songwriter and a guitar player, in that order.
J. J. Cale

I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.
Neri Oxman

I got out of high school, bought a recording studio and started operating it as an engineer and a producer.
T Bone Burnett