Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor.
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Success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration!
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The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success.
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Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me – the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love – He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us – nature did it all – not the gods of the religions.
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Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
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My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant - but misdirected - ideas of others.
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I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.
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I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.
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I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom.
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Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application.
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That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt. Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 - that is what it amounts to, with interest.
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Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on.
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I never did a day's work in my life, it was all fun.
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People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest.
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There is no substitute for hard work.
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It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
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A failure teaches you that something can't be done-that way.
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Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
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Barring serious accidents, if you are not preoccupied with worry and you work hard, you can look forward to a reasonably lengthy existence.... Its not the hard work that kills, its the worrying that kills.
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I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
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Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.
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First be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead.
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I have better use for my brain than to poison it with alcohol. To put alcohol in the human brain is like putting sand in the bearings of an engine.
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The thing I lose patience with the most is the clock. Its hands move too fast.