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

"Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before."

"We are all too much inclined, I think, to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked."

"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!"

"It is the man who carefully advances step by step...who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree."

"What this power is, I cannot say... All I know is that it exists."

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

"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."

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

"I have always considered myself as an Agnostic..."

"One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the USA"

"Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought."

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

"Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural."

"Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you. [First intelligible words spoken over the telephone]"

"The great advantage [the telephone] possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus consists in the fact that it requires no skill to operate the instrument."

"Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You'll be certain to find something you have never seen before."

"Watson, ... if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech."

"Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do, you will be certain to find something you have never seen before."

"Wherever you may find the inventor, you may give him wealth or you may take from him all that he has; and he will go on inventing. He can no more help inventing that he can help thinking or breathing."

"Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

"Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years."

"Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone."

"There are two critical points in every aerial flight-its beginning and its end."

"The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea."

"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 that has opened for us."

"Washington is no place in which to carry out inventions"

"The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter."

"Grand telegraphic discovery today … Transmitted vocal sounds for the first time ... With some further modification I hope we may be enabled to distinguish … the “timbre” of the sound. Should this be so, conversation viva voce by telegraph will be a fait accompli."

"I have had the feeling that a properly constructed flying-machine should be capable of being flown as a kite; and conversely, that a properly constructed kite should be capable of use as a flying-machine when driven by its own propellers."

"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."

"There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."

"I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?"

"I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them."

"To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him."

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."

"Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet."

"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."

"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have."

"A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals."