#Experimentation Quotes

“But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.”

“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”

“Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.”

“There's really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward - opening up new doors and doing new things - because we're curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting. We call it Imagineering - the blending of creative and imagination with technical know-how.”

“I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment.”

“I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”

“I've always had a feeling that any time you can experiment, you ought to do it. Because you never know what will happen.”

“The fun is in always building something. After it's built, you play with it awhile and then you're through. You see, we never do the same thing twice around here. We're always opening up new doors.”

“All life is an experiment.”

“Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”

“But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.”

“When you feel you have good although incomplete expertise, start trying things. If it's not working, try something else; maintain an experimental mindset.”

“Do something. Get results. Decide if it's worth repeating.”

“No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.”

“Success depends on how many experiments you can fit into 24 hours”

“No, I haven't failed thousands of times. On the contrary, I have successfully eliminated thousands of ideas that do not work!”

“I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.”

“When there's no experimenting there's no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.”

“Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.”

“We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.”

“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.”

“I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.”

“I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”

“After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldnt be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.”

“I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.”

“X-rays ... I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms.”

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

“The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.”

“I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.”

“A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work."”

“Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”

“I didn’t fail ten thousand times.I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times,materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

“As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.”

“Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.”

“I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.”

“Life is about trying things to see if they work.”

“Satyagraha as conceived by me is a science in the making.”

“I do things I don't know how to do in order to learn how to do them.”

“Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”

“I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.”

“I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.”

“I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.”

“I once Experimented with marijuna, next thing I know I'm waking up with blood on my hands.......and not my own blood.”

“All my experiments in Ahimsa have taught me that nonviolence in practice means common labour with the body.”

“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

“The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress.”

“I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.”