Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.
Interpretation
Our senses can only understand a small part of reality.
Nikola Tesla emphasizes the limitations of human perception, suggesting that while our senses are vital for understanding the world, they only allow us to experience a tiny fraction of the vast complexities that exist beyond our immediate observation. This acknowledgment of our sensory limitations invites curiosity and encourages exploration beyond what is readily visible or understandable.
In practice
In a scientific presentation about the limitations of human perception.
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.
Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.
The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.
The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War.
I am unwilling to accord to some small−minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time, but the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.
Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over along their surfaces, a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken through his own body, will probably convince him.
The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
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