Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
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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 never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
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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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Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
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I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.
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No Such Thing as Bad Results.
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Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
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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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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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I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'
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Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
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In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again.
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I have had a lot of success with failure
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Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
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The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.
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Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!
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Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.
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I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one.
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The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.
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I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph.
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We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy - sun, wind and tide. ... 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 have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.
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We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.