Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.
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Absorb ideas from every source.
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Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
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I failed my way to success.
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Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
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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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Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best.
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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'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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I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.
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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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Success is based on imagination plus ambition and the will to work.
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The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization.... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation
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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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I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent 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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Seeming to do is not doing.
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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.
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If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
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Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.
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Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.
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To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.
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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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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.