Nikola Tesla Quotes - Page 4
I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.
February, 1919Source:
There were many days when [I] did not know where my next meal was coming from. But I was never afraid to work, I went where some men were digging a ditch ... [and] said I wanted to work. The boss looked at my good clothes and white hands and laughed to the others ... but he said, "All right. Spit on your hands. Get in the ditch." And I worked harder than anybody. At the end of the day I had $2.
July 12th, 1937Source:
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
July, 1934
But we shall not satisfy ourselves simply with improving steam and explosive engines or inventing new batteries; we have something much better to work for, a greater task to fulfill. We have to evolve means for obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever.
March, 1897Source:
What the result of these investigations will be the future will tell; but whatever they may be, and to whatever this principle may lead, I shall be sufficiently recompensed if later it will be admitted that I have contributed a share, however small, to the advancement of science.
June 22nd, 1888
If this does not appeal to you sufficiently to recognize in me a discoverer of principles, do me, at least, the justice of calling me an "inventor of some beautiful pieces of electrical apparatus.
June 23rd, 1907Source:
Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.
February 9th, 1935Source:
Man was born to work, to suffer and to fight, because whoever does not do so must perish.
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
July, 1934
The opinion of the world does not affect me. I have placed as the real values in my life what follows when I am dead.
July 23rd, 1934Source: