Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.
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The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
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I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!
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Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
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Being busy does not always mean real work.
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I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.
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I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.
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Friendship is the heaven of life.
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Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
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The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.
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I never failed. It just didn't work 10,000 times.
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Sticking to it is the genius.
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Focus on how the end-user customers perceive the impact of your innovation - rather than on how you, the innovators, perceive it.
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A lawsuit is the suicide of time.
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There is much more opportunity than there are people to see it.
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Today, I am wondering what would have happened to me by now, if, fifty years ago, some fluent talker had converted me to the theory of the eight-hour day and convinced me that it was not fair to my fellow-workers to put forth my best efforts in my work? I am glad that the eight-hour day had not been invented when I was a young man. If my life had been made up of eight-hour days, I don't believe I could have accomplished a great deal.
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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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The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
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I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.
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I've never made a mistake. I've only learned from experience.
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What is a college? An institute of learning. What is a business? An institute of learning. Life, itself, is an institute of learning.
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There is always a better way.
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One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
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A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work."