Nikola Tesla Quotes: 30 Lines and Where Each One Comes From

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30 Quotations From Nikola Tesla, With Their Sources

Most of the Nikola Tesla quotes that circulate online can be traced to things he really wrote or said: technical lectures from the 1890s, magazine essays from 1900 to 1934, newspaper interviews and his short 1919 memoir My Inventions. A handful of the most shared lines, though, have no known source at all and were almost certainly put in his mouth later. Below, the thirty lines in this collection are grouped by where they come from, put into plain words, and marked clearly when the attribution is shaky.

Grouping them this way shows which lines are safe to quote and how his thinking moved from engineering toward energy, war, invention and the future of work.

Who Tesla was, in brief

Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire (today in Croatia), to a Serbian family. He moved to New York in June 1884 and spent roughly six months at the Edison Machine Works before going his own way. His polyphase alternating-current induction motor patents were licensed to George Westinghouse in 1888 and became one of the foundations of the AC systems that won the so-called war of the currents against Edison's direct current.

He patented the Tesla coil in 1891, showed a radio-controlled boat in New York in 1898, ran high-voltage experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899 and began the Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island with money from J. P. Morgan, a wireless project that ran out of funds and was never finished. In his later years he lived in a series of New York hotels, often short of money, and he died alone in his room on 7 January 1943. In 1960 the SI unit of magnetic flux density, the tesla, was named after him.

Lines from his lectures and the 1900 Century essay

The earliest line here comes from his 1892 lecture Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency, given in London. Wikiquote confirms the source.

  • No. 10, energy everywhere in space (1892). Tesla argued that space is full of energy, and that if this energy is in motion, as he was sure it was, people will sooner or later hook their machines up to the workings of nature itself. It is the seed of his lifelong dream of drawing power from the environment.

Six more come from his long essay The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, published in Century Illustrated Magazine in June 1900. In it he treated humanity as one great mass in motion and asked what speeds it up and what holds it back.

  • No. 13, food, peace, work. His three-word answer to how human energy can be increased: feed people, stop wars, and put effort to productive use.
  • No. 14, the individual and the whole. Single lives are brief and even nations rise and fall, he wrote, yet humankind as a whole goes on.
  • No. 15, the scientist as planter. A researcher, in his view, works for people who come later, laying groundwork and pointing a direction without expecting quick rewards or quick acceptance.
  • No. 16, invisible ties. People are free to think and act, yet bound together like stars, by connections no one can see but everyone can feel.
  • No. 17, virtues and failings. Our strengths and weaknesses belong together the way force and matter do; separate them and the person is gone.
  • No. 18, ignorance as friction. Of everything that slows human progress, he named ignorance as the worst, borrowing the Buddhist idea that it is the root of suffering.

Wireless power and the 1904 Electrical World article

In March 1904, with Wardenclyffe in trouble, Tesla published "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires" in Electrical World and Engineer. It is a pitch as much as a paper, and three lines in this list come from it.

  • No. 1, the Earth as a small metal ball. To electric currents, he claimed, our huge planet behaves almost like a tiny conductor, which is why he believed energy could be sent around the globe.
  • No. 2, the limits of the senses. "Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world." It is one of the few lines quoted here word for word, because it is short and well sourced.
  • No. 3, conflict and misunderstanding. Quarrels between people and wars between nations, he argued, grow out of misunderstanding, meaning a failure to see things from the other side. Cheap, instant communication, he hoped, would reduce that.

From his 1919 memoir, My Inventions

My Inventions first appeared as a series of articles in Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919 and was later collected as a book. It mixes childhood memories, accounts of his visions and his views on invention.

  • No. 4, instinct beyond logic. He wrote that instinct can go further than knowledge, and that people seem to have finer faculties that grasp a truth when reasoning gets stuck.
  • No. 5, invention and progress. "The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention." He opens the memoir with this idea.
  • No. 6, peace through enlightenment. Lasting peace, he believed, can only come once knowledge is spread widely.
  • No. 7, mind over matter. He called invention the most important product of the creative mind, aimed ultimately at putting the material world under human control and in service of human needs.
  • No. 9, the wonders of yesterday. We hunger for new sensations, he noted, then quickly get used to them, so the marvels of one year become ordinary the next.
  • No. 8, the "last 29 days of the month" joke. This one does not appear in the memoir, and there is no evidence Tesla said it. Treat it as a modern joke with his name attached.

Interviews and late articles, 1896 to 1937

As Tesla became a celebrity, reporters sought him out, and he wrote for popular magazines. These lines carry the sources usually given for them; the ones checked against Wikiquote are noted.

  • No. 25, the inventor's thrill (1896). In an interview with Cleveland Moffett for the Atlanta Constitution, he said no feeling compares with watching an idea of yours turn into a working thing, a joy strong enough to make you forget food, sleep and friends. Wikiquote lists it via a later book on Marconi and Tesla.
  • No. 23, civilization as a fire (1910). Credited to a Denver Rocky Mountain News piece, it compares civilization to a fire that starts as a spark and grows into a blaze that spreads ever faster.
  • No. 11, the wheelwork of the universe. Usually dated to a 1915 New York American article. Wikiquote records a closely related image, of living beings hitched to the wheelwork of the universe, in a 1930 essay, so the wording varies between versions.
  • No. 24, knowing and not knowing (1915). From The Wonder World To Be Created By Electricity in Manufacturer's Record: the more we learn, the more we see how much we do not know, and that widening horizon is one of the rewards of thinking.
  • No. 12, money (1927). In a visit reported by Dragislav Petković in the Belgrade paper Politika, Tesla said money is overvalued and that he had put all of his into experiments meant to make life easier for others. Wikiquote confirms this source.
  • No. 27, solitude (1934). The advice to be alone because that is when ideas are born is quoted in Thomas P. Hughes's history American Genesis. Wikiquote traces it to a New York Times piece, "An Inventor's Seasoned Ideas," from 8 April 1934.
  • Nos. 28, 29 and 30 (1934). All three come from "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July 1934. In them he says his guiding wish is to put natural forces to work for people; complains that physicists have swapped experiments for chains of equations that drift away from reality; and adds his best-known jab: "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." He was aiming at relativity, which he rejected, and history sided with Einstein on that point.
  • Nos. 21 and 22 (1937). Attributed to "A Machine to End War" in Liberty magazine: robots will take over the work once done by slaves, and life is an equation that cannot be solved, though some of its factors are known. The robot prediction is striking for its time, but the article is not on Wikiquote, so treat the exact wording with some care.

Popular lines with no known source

Several of the most shared "Tesla quotes" do not turn up in his writings, interviews or the main quote collections. Wikiquote's page on him does not list them.

  • No. 19, the stolen idea. The quip that he did not mind people stealing his ideas, only that they had none of their own, fits the legend of Tesla versus Edison and Marconi, but there is no record of him saying it.
  • No. 20, studying non-physical phenomena. The prediction that science would advance more in a decade than in all previous centuries once it studied the non-physical is widely used on spiritual websites. No original source has been found.
  • No. 26, God and the laws of physics. A neat line, but untraced. Tesla was raised in a Serbian Orthodox priest's family and wrote about religion in other terms.
  • A bonus line, "energy, frequency and vibration." It is not in this list, but it travels with these quotes. It rests only on a later recollection by a man who said he heard Tesla say it, with no written record from Tesla himself.

If you want to quote Tesla in something that matters, use the sourced lines above and name the article or book they come from.

What the quotes reveal about his thinking

Read together, the sourced lines show a few steady themes. Tesla saw invention as a moral project, a way to lift people out of drudgery, and he believed cheap energy and fast communication would make war less likely. He prized solitude and long concentration. He was also stubborn: the same confidence that drove his AC work led him to dismiss relativity and to promise wireless power that never arrived.

That mix is part of why he still fascinates people. He was right about a great deal, from alternating current to remote control and automation, and wrong about some things, and his quotes carry both.

The short video that accompanies this collection reads many of these lines aloud over images of Tesla (original on YouTube).

Sources: Wikipedia: Nikola Tesla; Wikiquote: Nikola Tesla; video: 30 Words Of Wisdom By The Great Scientist, Nikola Tesla (YouTube).

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COMMENTS

BLOGGER: 2
  1. UnknownMay 9, 2015 at 6:58 AM

    Nikola Tesla was born in little town Smilčić, Croatia, at that time Austro-Hungarian

    ReplyDelete