Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.
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I can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.
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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.
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The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.
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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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When you become quiet, it just dawns on you.
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Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
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Fish seem to be rather conservative around this bay, one seldom catches enough to form the fundamental basis for a lie. Dante left out one of the torments of Hades I could imagine a doomed mortal made to untangle wet fish lines forever. Everybody lost patience at the stupidity of the fish in not coming forward promptly to be murdered.
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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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Because I readily absorb ideas from every source - frequently starting where the last person left off - I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
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No Such Thing as Bad Results.
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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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I have had a lot of success with failure
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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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Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
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I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.
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The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
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Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.
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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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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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The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.
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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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There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start a new.
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If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.