Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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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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A genius is a talented person who does his homework.
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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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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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If there is a better solution... find it.
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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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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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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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To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
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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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This problem, once solved, will be simple.
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Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
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Friendship is the heaven of life.
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Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's ... scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!
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I have had a lot of success with failure
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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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Show me a thoroughly satisfied man - and I will show you a failure.
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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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Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
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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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Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
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Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.