Thomas A. Edison Quotes
-
If there is a better solution... find it.
-
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.
-
A genius is a talented person who does his homework.
-
I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.
-
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.
-
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 can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.
-
The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man - and I will show you a failure.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-
I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
-
Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
-
The secret of success is focus of purpose.
-
Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
-
Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
-
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.
-
There's a way to do it better - find it.
-
I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.