Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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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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Absorb ideas from every source.
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I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.
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Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
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Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
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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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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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Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
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I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
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A genius is a talented person who does his homework.
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Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
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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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Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.
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I can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.
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I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.
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The brain can be developed just the same as the muscles can be developed, if on will only take the pains to train the mind to think.
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I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.
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Seeming to do is not doing.
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Success is the result of hard work.
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Baseball is the greatest of American games. Some say football, but it is my firm belief, and it shall always be, that baseball has no superior.
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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 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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Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
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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.