Don’t be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don’t follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it’s enough.
The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.
It is easy to build a philosophy – it doesn’t have to run.
Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.
The person who doesn’t know something can’t be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.
A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man’s head.
In many ways ideas are more important than people – they are much more permanent.
The sure ways to create new ventures of discovery are to keep an open mind.
Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
The difference between intelligence and an education is this-that intelligence will make you a good living.
It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.
My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.
I don’t want men of experience working for me. The experienced man is always telling me why something can’t be done. The fellow who has not had any experience is so dumb he doesn’t know a thing can’t be done – and he goes ahead and does it.
People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.
Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Bankers regard research as most dangerous a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry.
People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.