Thomas A. Edison Quotes

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!

There is far more opportunity than there is ability.

What is a college? An institute of learning. What is a business? An institute of learning. Life, itself, is an institute of learning.

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favor compared with the products of nature, the living cell of the plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.

Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.

It is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency-instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds. If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector-for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges-then you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

When there's no experimenting there's no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.

The First 40 hours of work per week are for survival. Everything after that is for success.

I would rather have one man with enthusiasm working with me than ten who are complacent.

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.

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.

There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start a new.

Consider data without prejudice.

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.

When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.

Never Say I Failed 99 Times, Say I Discovered 99 Ways Which Causes Failure!

Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something.

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

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.

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.

Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.

I've realized that most of my best ideas have followed a good night's sleep.

There is no limit to which a man will not go to avoid thinking.

I think that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed. Judging from the past, I cannot help thinking that the intention of the Supreme Intelligence that rules the world is to ultimately make such a type of man universal.

My success is due more to my ability to work continuously on one thing without stopping than to any other single quality.

I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

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

I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.

Even though I am nearly deaf, I seem to be gifted with a kind of inner hearing which enables me to detect sounds and noises which the ordinary person does not hear.

I was at the foot of my class.

A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job

Work while others are wishing.

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.

My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant - but misdirected - ideas of others.

Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition-and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing that gives out and then that-"Bugs"as such little faults and difficulties are called show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success-or failure-is certainly reached.

What a man's mind can create, man's character can control.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work.

Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.

I have had a lot of success with failure

Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking around laboratory tables all day. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.

My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.