50+ Inspirational George Washington Carver Quotes to Ignite Your Passion and Purpose

"When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."

- George Washington Carver

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom."

- 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

"From oppressive and crippling surroundings, George Washington Carver lifted his searching, creative mind to the ordinary peanut, and found therein extraordinary possibilities for goods and products unthinkable by minds of the past."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything."

- 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

"Do what you can, with what you have and do it now!"

- George Washington Carver

"There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything."

- George Washington Carver

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

- George Washington Carver

"From crippling circumstance, George Washington Carver made for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of science."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"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

"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

"Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater."

- George Washington Carver

"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

"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

"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

"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 that my Redeemer lives. Thank God I love humanity, complexion doesn’t interest me one single a bit."

- 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 reserved 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

"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

"No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving something behind."

- 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible, ‘In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.’” (Proverbs 3:6)"

- 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

"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

"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

"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

"The things, which he achieved in the face of early handicaps, will for all time afford an inspiration of youth everywhere."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"From Carver's small laboratory at Tuskegee came formulas in agricultural chemistry that enriched the entire Southland, indeed the whole of America and the world."

- Langston Hughes

"The scientific discoveries and experiments of Dr. Carver have done more to alleviate the one-crop agricultural system in the South than any other thing that has been done in the history of the United States."

- Harry S. Truman

"Dr. Carver left a legacy of hope and beacon light pointing to opportunities of the future... This Negro scientist who was born of slave parents succeeded by hard work and exalted vision to the stature of one of the most outstanding agricultural research scientists in the world."

- Payne Ratner

"Professor Carver, like the other men I have mentioned, is of unmixed African blood, and is one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted. Whenever anyone who takes a scientific interest in cotton. Whenever any one who takes a scientific interest in cotton growing, or in the natural history of this part of the world, comes to visit Tuskegee, he invariably seeks out and consults Professor Carver."

- Booker T. Washington

"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

"Where there is no vision, there is no hope."

- 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

"If you love it enough, anything will talk with you."

- George Washington Carver

"Although Professor Carver impresses every one who meets him with the extent of his knowledge in the matter of plant life, he is quite the most modest man I have ever met."

- Booker T. Washington

"When Dr. Carver died, the United States lost one of her finest Christian gentleman. He was a good friend of my father and mother and I had known him for forty-seven years. To the world, he was known as a scientist. Those who knew him best, however, realized that this outstanding characteristic was a strong feeling of the eminence of God. Everything he was and did found its origin in that strong ans continuous feeling."

- H. A. Wallace

"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

"I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me."

- 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

"From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies."

- 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 would never allow anyone to give me money, no difference how badly I needed it. I wanted literally to earn my living."

- 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

"No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets."

- George Washington Carver

"If you listen carefully enough to anything, it will talk to you."

- 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

"[He] achieved a place as one of the foremost scientists of all the world for all time."

- Bennett Champ Clark

"His work was his life, and by not diluting it with wrathful forays against the ignorance of prejudice he was able to make his own unique and most vital contribution to racial amity."

- Lawrence Elliott

"Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise."

- George Washington Carver

"Years ago I went into my laboratory and said, 'Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?' The Great Creator answered, 'You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size, little man.'"

- George Washington Carver

"God cannot use you as He wishes until you come into the fullness of His Glory. Do not get alarmed, my friend, when doubts creep in. That is old Satan. Pray, pray, pray."

- George Washington Carver

"Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill... With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum."

- 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

"Without my Savior, I am nothing."

- George Washington Carver

"We have become 99 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

"Dr. George Washington Carver was one of the wonders of this age... Those who believe and teach that a man's heritage determines his spiritual, mental and physical traits will be hard put to explain the source of Dr. Carver's amazing intellect."

"If we were asked what living man had the worst start and the best finish, we would say, Dr. Carver. It's a great loss to us that we have no one like him in England."