The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.

If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run

People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.

Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.

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.