Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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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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I will not say I failed 1000 times, I will say that I discovered there are 1000 ways that can cause failure.
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Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
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I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.
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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
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I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
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Large portions of life's disappointments are individuals who did not understand that they were so near achievement when they surrendered.
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I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will 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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Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
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Absorb ideas from every source.
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After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldnt be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.
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I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.
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A genius is a talented person who does his homework.
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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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Seeming to do is not doing.
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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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Success is based on imagination plus ambition and the will to work.
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Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
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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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Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best.
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I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'
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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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To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.