George Washington Carver was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century. These George Washington Carver quotes will inspire you.
Famous George Washington Carver Quotes
- “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “When I was young, I said to God, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the universe.’ But God answered, ‘That knowledge is for me alone.’ So I said, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.’ Then God said, ‘Well George, that’s more nearly your size.’ And he told me.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Most people search high and wide for the key to success. If they only knew, the key to their dreams lies within.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “God is going to reveal to us things He never revealed before if we put our hands in His. No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way of doing it are revealed to me. I never have to grope for methods. The method is revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain I would be helpless.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Do what you can, with what you have and do it now!” ~ George Washington Carver
- “It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “My prayers seem to be more of an attitude than anything else. I indulge in very little lip service, but ask the Great Creator silently, daily, and often many times a day, to permit me to speak to Him through the three great Kingdoms of the world which He has created – the animal, mineral, and vegetable Kingdoms – to understand their relations to each other, and our relations to them and to the Great God who made all of us. I ask Him daily and often momently to give me wisdom, understanding, and bodily strength to do His will; hence I am asking and receiving all the time.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Learn to do the common things uncommonly well.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “In these strenuous times, we are likely to become morbid and look constantly on the dark side of life, and spend entirely too much time considering and brooding over what we can’t do, rather than what we can do, and instead of growing morose and despondent over opportunities either real or imaginary that are shut from us, let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer and upon which there is no color line; simply the survival of the fittest.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Without my Savior, I am nothing.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “One of the things that has helped me as much as any other is not how long I am going to live, but how much I can do while living.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for ones self.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “When our thoughts – which bring actions – are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “All my life I have risen regularly at four o’clock and have gone into the woods and talked to God. There He gives me my orders for the day.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“You can’t teach people anything. You can only draw out.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “There is literally nothing that I ever asked to do, that I asked the blessed Creator to help me to do, that I have not been able to accomplish.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “God is going to reveal to us things He never revealed before if we put our hands in His.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “My purpose alone must be God’s purpose.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “I know that my Redeemer lives. Thank God I love humanity, complexion doesn’t interest me one single a bit.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“There are two ways, one is right; the other is wrong. If your work is only about right, then it is wrong.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Unkindness to anything means an injustice to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you, I am kind to you. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil. The farmer whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it in some way; that is, he is not doing by it what he should; he is robbing it of some substance it must have, and he becomes, therefore, a soil robber rather than a progressive farmer.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “If you listen carefully enough to anything, it will talk to you.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“There is no shortcut to achievement.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Believe. The promise of God are real. They are as real, as solid, yes infinitely more solid than this table which the materialist so thoroughly believes in. If you would only believe, O ye of little faith.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “To those who have as yet not learned the secret of true happiness, which is the joy of coming into the closest relationship with the Maker and Preserver of all things: begin now to study the little things in your own door yard.” ~ George Washington Carver Quotes
- “Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Young people, I want to beg of you always keep your eyes open to what Mother Nature has to teach you. By so doing you will learn many valuable things every day of your life.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“It is simply service that measures success.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “We get closer to God as we get more intimately and understandingly acquainted with the things He has created. I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for one’s self.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “All flowers talk to me and so do hundreds of little living things in the woods. I learn what I know by watching and loving everything.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Whatever you love opens its secrets to you.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Education is understanding relationships.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “I went to the trash pile at Tuskegee Institute and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing I found I could use. … [The early efforts were] worked out almost wholly on top of my flat topped writing desk and with teacups, glasses, bottles and reagents I made myself.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Nature is the greatest teacher and I learn from her best when others are asleep. In the still dark hours before sunrise God tells me of the plans I am to fulfill.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “You can’t tear up everything just to get the dollar out of it without suffering as result. It is a travesty to burn our woods and thereby burn up the fertilizer nature has provided for us. We must enrich our soil every year instead of merely depleting it. It is fundamental that nature will drive away those who commit sin against it.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“God gave them [the discoveries] to me; how can I sell them to someone else?” ~ George Washington Carver
- “The rapid growth of industry, the ever-increasing population and the imperative need for a more varied, wholesome and nourishing foodstuff makes it all the more necessary to exhaust every means at our command to fill the empty dinner pail, enrich our soils, bring greater wealth and influence to our beautiful Southland, which is synonymous to a healthy, happy and contented people.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this Earth to give us a breathing spell … as we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which are God’s true storehouse. We can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from things that grow.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you. You learn to talk to them.” ~ George Washington Carver
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“There is no shortcut to achievement.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “One reason I never patent my products is that if I did it would take so much time, I would get nothing else done. But mainly I don’t want my discoveries to benefit specific favored persons.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “When I touch that flower, I am not merely touching that flower. I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands, yes, millions of years to come.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “My work is that of keeping every operation down (in size) so that the farmer and the man farthest down can get hold of it.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “A life that stood out as a gospel of self-forgetting service. He could have added fortune to fame but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world. The center of his world was the south where he was born in slavery some 79 years ago and where he did his work as a creative scientist.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. At no other time have I so sharp an understanding of what God means to do with me as in these hours of dawn.” ~ George Washington Carver
