Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ...study and read everything you can on the subject.
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I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.
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I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting...not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.
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The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness... Unfortunately, many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
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This problem, once solved, will be simple.
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We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.
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Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.
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Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.
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During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem.
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There is no substitute for hard work.
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Success is based on imagination plus ambition and the will to work.
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When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
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The secret of success is focus of purpose.
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Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best.
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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.
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Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
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The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary.
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Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.
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It is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency-instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds. If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector-for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges-then you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.
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It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.
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Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.".
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There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for when Government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayers. Government never makes ends meetand that is the first requisite of business.
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I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
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We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.