Thomas A. Edison Quotes
-
The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.
-
We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.
-
Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.
-
When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
-
I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.
-
Large portions of life's disappointments are individuals who did not understand that they were so near achievement when they surrendered.
-
The secret of success is focus of purpose.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Seeming to do is not doing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
-
If there is a better solution... find it.
-
I can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.
-
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.
-
Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The value of an idea lies in the using of it.