“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.”

God has strewn our paths with wonders and we certainly should not go through life with our eyes shut.

The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.

First words on the first telephone – “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.”

There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfillment of animal desires.

I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all!

You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.

The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent.

One day every major city in America will have a telephone.

When one door closes, another one opens.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

Don’t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods.

The nation that secures control of the air will ultimately control the world.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.

Harebrained schemes often lead to great discoveries.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I’d learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.