Nikola Tesla — "Of all things, I liked books best."
Of all things, I liked books best.
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More from Nikola Tesla
"If I try to continue a broken line of thought, I feel a veritable spiritual nausea, then, almost by chance, I go over to another job, surprised by the freshness of mind and ease with which I overcome …"
"Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine."
"I am not an inventor, I am a discoverer."
"I do not believe in the spirit of competition, but in the spirit of cooperation."
"I do not marry, for I consider that for an inventor, marriage is a great obstacle."
About Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose alternating-current designs powered the modern electrical grid; died poor and largely forgotten. Closely associated with George Westinghouse (his AC-power business partner) and Mihajlo Pupin (fellow Serbian-American physicist at Columbia). For an intellectual contrast, see Thomas Edison, American inventor and direct-current advocate — Edison's direct-current power-distribution scheme was displaced by Tesla-Westinghouse AC in the 1890s 'War of Currents'. Edison ran a public-relations campaign electrocuting animals to discredit AC — the most famous engineering-ethics rivalry in American history. Tesla's AC won and powers nearly every electrical grid on Earth.
Details
A simple, direct statement revealing his passion for reading.
Date: Late 19th - early 20th century (approximate)
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Out of everything life offers — wealth, recognition, relationships, experiences — books ranked highest. This is a clean, unambiguous statement that the written word and the ideas it carries mattered more than anything else. In modern terms: given unlimited options, he would still choose a library. It signals that accumulated human knowledge, freely accessible through reading, felt more valuable than any physical comfort, social status, or material reward.
Relevance to Nikola Tesla
Tesla's bond with books was extraordinary. Raised in a Serbian household where his mother — despite no formal schooling — memorized long epic poems and encouraged deep reading, he developed a near-photographic memory that let him internalize texts completely. He taught himself calculus, mastered six languages, and credited Goethe's Faust with sparking his AC motor insight. His inventions often lived first as complete mental constructions, built from principles absorbed through obsessive reading, not physical trial and error.
The era
Tesla grew up in the 1860s–1880s in rural Serbia, then studied in Austria and Germany before arriving in America in 1884. In this pre-radio, pre-cinema era, books were the only way knowledge traveled across continents. The electrical sciences he revolutionized were advancing rapidly through academic journals and texts — Faraday, Maxwell, and Helmholtz were reshaping physics in print. For a self-driven intellect in provincial Europe, a book was a portal to the entire frontier of human discovery.
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