I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

People are not remembered by how few times they fail, but by how often they succeed. Every wrong step is another step forward

From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.

I never view mistakes as failures. They are simply opportunities to find out what doesn't work.

It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.

Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.