Top 100 James Dyson Quotes
#1. Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That's what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there's nothing in it. There's no interest, you learn nothing actually.
James Dyson
#2. When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.
James Dyson
#3. In the past, the U.K. got away with selling things that weren't unusual. Now it's no use trying to export without having something that's unusual and better.
James Dyson
#4. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.
James Dyson
#5. I'm afraid I am tidy, and I have to be because the office is open plan and my glass office door is literally always open.
James Dyson
#6. Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.
James Dyson
#7. I own every share of my company, and I don't want to sell any of it.
James Dyson
#8. People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them.
James Dyson
#9. My interest in film is sort of catholic - apart from science fiction and horror movies, I'll watch almost everything.
James Dyson
#11. Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.
James Dyson
#12. The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.
James Dyson
#13. Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.
James Dyson
#14. I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That's how I came up with a solution. So I don't mind failure.
James Dyson
#15. Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.
James Dyson
#16. Cordless vacuums are designed for quick jobs, but you need enough power to do the job; you don't want the power waning over time.
James Dyson
#17. People buy products if they're better.
James Dyson
#18. Well, I'm rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven't apparently made them with a great love for what they're doing.
James Dyson
#19. Emerging markets are hugely important.
James Dyson
#20. I grew up running miles of the Norfolk coastline. I'd think nothing of a six-mile run before breakfast. I still run, though not as far and not before muesli.
James Dyson
#21. I've fought court battles over my inventions before.
James Dyson
#22. As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.
James Dyson
#23. Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.
James Dyson
#24. The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.
James Dyson
#25. Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.
James Dyson
#26. Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.
James Dyson
#27. The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.
James Dyson
#28. Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.
James Dyson
#30. An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.
James Dyson
#31. When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren't important.
James Dyson
#32. We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.
James Dyson
#33. The key to success is failure ... Success is made of 99 percent failure.
James Dyson
#34. In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.
James Dyson
#35. The important thing is to learn from mistakes - something graduates are adept at. Our graduate engineers are working on new technology - from uncharted applications for our digital motor, to a new take on the hand dryer. With an unhindered mind, nothing is off limits.
James Dyson
#36. In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.
James Dyson
#37. The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.
James Dyson
#38. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology
James Dyson
#39. Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don't need great big vacuums anymore.
James Dyson
#40. I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.
James Dyson
#41. Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.
James Dyson
#42. What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.
James Dyson
#43. One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.
James Dyson
#44. We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.
James Dyson
#45. I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.
James Dyson
#46. I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don't necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.
James Dyson
#47. Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.
James Dyson
#49. We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.
James Dyson
#50. If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.
James Dyson
#51. Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.
James Dyson
#54. The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.
James Dyson
#55. When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.
James Dyson
#56. Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.
James Dyson
#57. Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.
James Dyson
#58. Insurance companies don't make anything.
James Dyson
#59. Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.
James Dyson
#60. Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.
James Dyson
#61. The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.
James Dyson
#62. Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.
James Dyson
#63. So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.
James Dyson
#64. We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don't just try to make money out of money.
James Dyson
#65. I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.
James Dyson
#66. Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.
James Dyson
#67. Well, air-conditioning is not a good thing.
James Dyson
#68. I just think things should work properly
James Dyson
#70. Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn't penalise the latter.
James Dyson
#71. As a modern employer you have to treat people well.
James Dyson
#72. [M]anufacturing, science and engineering are ... incredibly creative. I'd venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.
James Dyson
#74. Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.
James Dyson
#75. If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.
James Dyson
#76. I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.
James Dyson
#77. If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.
James Dyson
#78. The wonderful thing about Apple technology is just how intuitive it is.
James Dyson
#79. It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.
James Dyson
#80. Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope.
James Dyson
#81. If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.
James Dyson
#82. Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.
James Dyson
#83. When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
James Dyson
#84. Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.
James Dyson
#85. Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can't plan 21 years ahead.
James Dyson
#86. You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.
James Dyson
#87. I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.
James Dyson
#88. The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property.
James Dyson
#89. What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.
James Dyson
#90. At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.
James Dyson
#91. China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.
James Dyson
#92. Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.
James Dyson
#95. All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers.
James Dyson
#96. Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.
James Dyson
#97. I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you'll be very highly paid once you've got them.
James Dyson
#98. Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.
James Dyson
#99. I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.
James Dyson
#100. I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you're going to do when you've got your degree.
James Dyson
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