Thomas A. Edison Quotes
-
Seeming to do is not doing.
-
I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.
-
This problem, once solved, will be simple.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.
-
Success is based on imagination plus ambition and the will to work.
-
The secret of success is focus of purpose.
-
Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.
-
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.
-
Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.
-
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best.
-
Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.
-
There is no substitute for hard work.
-
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
-
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Absorb ideas from every source.
-
We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.
-
I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.
-
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.