These steam quotes will inspire you. Steam, the hot gas that is produced when water boils or the vapor into which water is converted when heated, forming a white mist of minute water droplets in the air.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging steam quotes, steam sayings, and steam proverbs.
Best Steam Quotes
- “True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Desire is what takes the hot water of mediocrity and turns it into the steam of outstanding success.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- “When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality.” ~ George William Russell , Steam quotes engine
- “The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we’ll know.” ~ Edward Abbey
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“Reason and justice tell me there’s more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “Willpower is steam for life’s locomotion.” ~ Praveen Kumar
- “Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.” ~ L. Frank Baum
- “Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn’t because we didn’t have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing – electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important – I’m not taking anything away from that – but innovation is the real driver of progress.” ~ Bill Gates
- “The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant’s soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience” ~ John Timbs
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“Remember the steam kettle; though up to its neck in hot water it continues to sing.” ~ Brownie Wise
- “Spoken of the young Archimedes: . . . [he] was as much enchanted by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the boiler; more enchanted, perhaps for the engine would have got broken, and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm, while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities.” ~ Archimedes
- “Time passed by. I had furnished steam hammers to the principal foundries in England. I had sent them abroad, even to Russia. At length it became known to the Lords of the Admiralty that a new power in forging had been introduced.” ~ James Nasmyth
- “Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.” ~ James Bryant Conant
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“Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.” ~ Lawrence Joseph Henderson
- “Steam becomes a mighty power only when it allows itself to be imprisoned in a strong little reservoir, produces tremendous motion and carries huge weights by permitting itself a tiny and measured outlet.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “The best ideas aren’t hidden in shadowy recesses. They’re right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. Innovation seldom depends on discovering obscure or subtle elements but in seeing the obvious with fresh eyes. This is easier said than done because nothing is as hard to see as what’s right before our eyes. We overlook what we take for granted. Billions of tea drinkers observed the force of steam escaping from water boiling in a kettle before James Watt realized that this vapor could be converted into energy.” ~ Richard Farson
- “Electricity, water, gas, and steam course through the walls of my building, keeping it alive.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
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“A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.” ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
- “The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth – right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.” ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
- “I was sort of like a kid in a candy store, realizing it was fun making beats without the perceived burden that every track I did had to be a some progressive sample masterpiece. It was nice to blow off steam and work on those songs. For me, that’s what ‘The Outsider’ was about in general: forget everything, I’m just gonna follow my own music, and make the music I want to make.” ~ DJ Shadow
- “I’m truly grateful for my microwave, which allows me to easily clarify butter, steam vegetables, and – when I am really lazy – feed my three kids in less than five minutes.” ~ Sara Gruen
- “Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery’s being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880’s, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.” ~ Edward Teller
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“You want to go in the steam bath to get your vocals sounding well, but you don’t want your fingers to get soft.” ~ Brian May
- “[At the end of the story, its main character, Tom] is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen’s egg don’t turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things that no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues.” ~ Charles Kingsley
- “You build up a head of steam. If you’re four days out of the studio, on the fifth day you really crash in there. You will kill anybody who disturbs you on that fifth day, when you desperately need it.” ~ Susan Rothenberg
- “Mankind has always drawn from outside sources of energy. This island was the first to harness coal and steam. But our present sources stand in the ratio of a million to one, compared with any previous sources. The release of atomic energy will change the whole structure of society.” ~ Frederick Soddy
- “Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man’s moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.” ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin
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“A man can’t be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steam ships. . . it seems safe to say that such ideas are wholly visionary and even if the machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could use his own yacht.” ~ William Henry Pickering
- “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.” ~ Charles Sanders Peirce
- “The thing about breaking up when you get older, you just don’t have the steam anymore. “Oh, that’s it. I can’t start shaving my legs above the knee again.”” ~ Elayne Boosler
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“The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.” ~ Charles Stross
- “It is sunlight in modified form which turns all the windmills and water wheels and the machinery which they drive. It is the energy derived from coal and petroleum (fossil sunlight) which propels our steam and gas engines, our locomotives and automobiles. … Food is simply sunlight in cold storage.” ~ John Harvey Kellogg
- “The steam-engine in its manifold applications, the crime-decreasing gas-lamp, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, the law of storms and rules for the mariner’s guidance in them, the power of rendering surgical operations painless, the measures for preserving public health, and for preventing or mitigating epidemics,-such are among the more important practical results of pure scientific research, with which mankind have been blessed and States enriched.” ~ Richard Owen
- “In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “And as for other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,-sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard! This contributed to the passing of the Pure Food Act of 1906.” ~ Upton Sinclair
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“Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Brands were a by-product of having great products and communicating them well to people. Power stations that generate a lot of electricity probably have a lot of steam coming out of the chimneys. That doesn’t mean to say that the engineers stand around working out how to make more steam.” ~ Hans Snook
- “A store is just a collection of content. The Steam store is this very safe, boring entertainment experience. Nobody says, ‘I’m going to play the Steam store now.'” ~ Gabe Newell
- “Recently I stood in the desert, far outside of L. A., and watched the sunset on a circus tent from 1930. Everywhere stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough.” ~ Robert Pattinson , Steam quotes train
- “What’s the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people’s content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.” ~ Gabe Newell
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“Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'” ~ Bill Gates
- “For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo’a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci’s simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy’s invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “How did Don Jackson influence the field of family therapy? How did Watts influence the steam engine? He made it. Others have refined the steam engine into a better, more efficient machine. I’d say that is what Don did for family therapy, he established the discipline. Others have gone on to refine it.” ~ Richard Fisch
- “Soup is cuisine’s kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability, as the five o’clock cup of tea or the cocktail hour.” ~ Louis Pullig De Gouy
- “Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power – all these things clearly represent economic progress.” ~ Kenneth E. Boulding
- “[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris]
[Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” ~ Henry Adams - “The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines, windmills were tried for draining mines; but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle.” ~ William Stanley Jevons
- “If the constitutional process is not brought to a successful conclusion before the European elections, then the whole process might run out of steam.” ~ Giorgio Napolitano
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“Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers.” ~ Gabe Newell
- “At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.” ~ Harvey V. Fineberg
- “Culture is not created by command. It creates itself, arising spontaneously from the necessities of men and their social cooperative activity. No ruler could ever command men to fashion the first tools, first use fire, invent the telescope and the steam engine, or compose the Iliad. Cultural values do not arise by direction of higher authorities. They cannot be compelled by dictates nor called into life by the resolution of legislative assemblies.” ~ Rudolf Rocker
- “When I know I have a huge shoot, I’ll just go into the sauna and steam out my face. Product-wise, I don’t really do much because I sometimes think products make me break out . I just use normal soap and water and moisturizer. My brows are really important to me but I’ve never plucked or waxed them. I’ll just fill them in with Anastasia brow kit.” ~ Chanel Iman
- “In remaking the world in the likeness of a steam-heated, air-conditioned metropolis of apartment buildings we have violated one of our essential attributes-our kinship with nature.” ~ Ross Parmenter
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“… once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- “The rockets light! The shuttle leaps off the launch pad in a cloud of steam and a trail of fire.” ~ Sally Ride
- “As any actor will tell you, the hardest thing to do is small parts, because you focus all your attention and concentration on that small part. When you’re playing the lead part, you don’t have time to think about the whole of it, so you just have to steam on and get on with it.” ~ Colin Baker
- “Electric telegraphs, printing, gas,
Tobacco, balloons, and steam,
Are little events that have come to pass
Since the days of the old regime.
And, spite of Lempriere’s dazzling page,
I’d give–though it might seem bold–
A hundred years of the Golden Age
For a year of the Age of Gold.” ~ Henry Sambrooke Leigh - “The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
