Top 100 Nikola Tesla Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance.”

— Nikola Tesla

52. “Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.”

— Nikola Tesla

53. “Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.”

— Nikola Tesla

54. “Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without.”

— Nikola Tesla

55. “There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man.”

— Nikola Tesla

56. “The beauty and the scent of roses can be used as a medicine and the sun rays as a food.”

— Nikola Tesla

57. “All matter comes from a primary substance, the luminiferous ether.”

— Nikola Tesla

58. “In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.”

— Nikola Tesla

59. “I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.”

— Nikola Tesla

60. “Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation.”

— Nikola Tesla

61. “The motors I build there were exactly as I imagined them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the pictures as they appeared to my vision and the operation was always as I expected.”

— Nikola Tesla

62. “To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.”

— Nikola Tesla

63. “Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.”

— Nikola Tesla

64. “Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe.”

— Nikola Tesla

65. “We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences.”

— Nikola Tesla

66. “Nature may reach the same result in many ways.”

— Nikola Tesla

67. “My mother understood human nature better and never chided. She knew that a man cannot be saved from his own foolishness or vice by someone else’s efforts or protests, but only by the use of his own will.”

— Nikola Tesla

68. “Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside.”

— Nikola Tesla

69. “My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible.”

— Nikola Tesla

70. “The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.”

— Nikola Tesla

71. “The last 29 days of the month are the toughest!”

— Nikola Tesla

72. “To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man’s mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world...”

— Nikola Tesla

73. “My wireless transmitter does not use Hertzian waves, which are a grievous myth, but sound waves in the aether...”

— Nikola Tesla

74. “It is a simple feat of scientific, electrical engineering – only expensive – oh blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.”

— Nikola Tesla

75. “It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.”

— Nikola Tesla

76. “When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots.”

— Nikola Tesla

77. “So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work.”

— Nikola Tesla

78. “The entire Earth will be converted into a huge brain.”

— Nikola Tesla

79. “Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of energy. I never paid such a price.”

— Nikola Tesla

80. “Is nature a giant cat? If so, who strokes its back?”

— Nikola Tesla

81. “It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.”

— Nikola Tesla

82. “So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself had electrically designed this planet...”

— Nikola Tesla

83. “We build but to tear down. Most of our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation. Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life. A cheerless view, but true.”

— Nikola Tesla

84. “The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.”

— Nikola Tesla

85. “The future will show whether my foresight is as accurate now as it has proved heretofore.”

— Nikola Tesla

86. “The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.”

— Nikola Tesla

87. “It has cost me years of thought to arrive at certain results, by many believed to be unattainable, for which there are now numerous claimants, and the number of these is rapidly increasing, like that of the colonels in the South after the war.”

— Nikola Tesla

88. “To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction.”

— Nikola Tesla

89. “If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn’t sweat as much.”

— Nikola Tesla

90. “All the great religions contain wise prescriptions relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they were promulgated.”

— Nikola Tesla

91. “Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe.”

— Nikola Tesla

92. “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents.”

— Nikola Tesla

93. “My ear barely caught signals coming in regular succession which could not have been produced on earth...”

— Nikola Tesla

94. “We should begin at the very root from which we spring, we should effect a radical reform in the character of the food.”

— Nikola Tesla

95. “I predict that very shortly the old-fashioned incandescent lamp, having a filament heated to brightness by the passage of electric current through it, will entirely disappear.”

— Nikola Tesla

96. “I am equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian fatherland.”

— Nikola Tesla

97. “Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.”

— Nikola Tesla

98. “With a different form of wireless instrument devised by me some years ago it was found practicable to locate a body of metallic ore below the ground, and it seems that a submarine could be similarly detected.”

— Nikola Tesla

99. “By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.”

— Nikola Tesla

100. “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”

— Nikola Tesla