There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I'd place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: LEAVE SLIDE RULES HERE! If I didn't do that, I'd find some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he'd be on his feet saying, Boss you can't do that.

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

Every great improvement has come after repeated failure. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are the posts on the road to achievement.

Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.

Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.