Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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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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Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
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The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.
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I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
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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 never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one.
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No Such Thing as Bad Results.
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When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
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Problems in human engineering will receive during the coming years the same genius and attention which the nineteenth century gave to the more material forms of engineering. We have laid good foundations for industrial prosperity, now we want to assure the happiness and growth of the workers through vocational education, vocational guidance, and wisely managed employment departments. A great field for industrial experimentation and statemanship is opening up.
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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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Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!
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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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I have had a lot of success with failure
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The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
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I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'
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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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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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Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.".
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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 greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.
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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 I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
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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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Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.