Nikola Tesla Quotes

Books without the knowledge of life are useless.

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

It is true I had been successful on a small scale in overcoming one of the main difficulties in the new process, but there was still much to invent, and much that at that period I necessarily knew nothing about.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected.

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Practical knowledge of what works and what doesn't work is much better. Theoretical knowledge is important, but I think practical knowledge works better.

Long intervals frequently elapse between the discovery of new principles in science and their practical application... Those intellectual qualifications, which give birth to new principles or to new methods, are of quite a different order from those which are necessary for their practical application.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that's really not the way it worked.

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

I teach something called The Law of Probabilities, which says the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work. The more books you read, the more likely one of them will have an answer to a question that could solve the major problems of your life.. make you wealthier, solve a health problem, whatever it might be.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

The real value of science is in the getting, and those who have tasted the pleasure of discovery alone know what science is. A problem solved is dead. A world without problems to be solved would be devoid of science.

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.

read thousands of books and I will power myself with knowledge. Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.

Book learning, or intelligence of one sort, doesn't guarantee you intelligence of another sort.You can behave just as stupidly with a good college education.

Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea?

The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong... There is no other effective way in which discoveries might be generated.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.