Top 100 Edison Thomas Quotes
#2. I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.
Thomas A. Edison
#3. I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.
Thomas A. Edison
#4. First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ... study and read everything you can on the subject.
Thomas A. Edison
#5. To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.
Thomas A. Edison
#6. The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder - deserted, motionless, dead.
Thomas A. Edison
#7. My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
Jonathan Franzen
#8. We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.
Thomas A. Edison
#10. To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.
Thomas A. Edison
#11. They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.
Thomas A. Edison
#12. We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.
Thomas A. Edison
#13. 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
Thomas A. Edison
#15. 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.
Thomas A. Edison
#16. Fooling around with alternating currents is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever. It's too dangerous ... it could kill a man as quick as a bolt of lightning. Direct current is safe.
Thomas A. Edison
#17. Books will soon be obsolete in the schools ... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.
Thomas A. Edison
#18. Nearly every person who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.
Thomas A. Edison
#19. We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will.
Thomas A. Edison
#20. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application,
Thomas A. Edison
#21. I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.
Quentin Tarantino
#22. If we did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." - Thomas Edison
Brian P. Moran
#23. The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization ... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation
Thomas A. Edison
#24. Perhaps dandruff is the excreta of the mind - the quantity of this material being directly proportional to the amount of reading one indulges in. A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit.
Thomas A. Edison
#25. I am so deaf I am debarred from hearing all the time articulation and have to depend on the judgment of others.
Thomas A. Edison
#27. Because I readily absorb ideas from every source - frequently starting where the last person left off - I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.
Thomas A. Edison
#28. I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.
Thomas A. Edison
#29. To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Thomas A. Edison
#30. Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have.
Thomas A. Edison
#31. I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life - our desire to go on living - our dread of coming to an end.
Thomas A. Edison
#32. Tomorrow Is My Exam But I Don't Care Because A Single Sheet Of Paper Can't Decide My Future
Thomas A. Edison
#33. The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.
Thomas A. Edison
#34. 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
Thomas A. Edison
#36. The money one gets for selling one's soul is always spent in deadening one's conscience, so the net gain at the end of a lifetime is no greater than if the diabolic bargain had not been struck.
Thomas A. Edison
#37. Nothing that's good works by itself, you've got to make the damn thing work.
Thomas A. Edison
#38. Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison
#40. I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.
Thomas A. Edison
#43. M. A. Rosanoff: Mr. Edison, please tell me what laboratory rules you want me to observe. Edison: There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish somep'n!
Thomas A. Edison
#44. Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.
Thomas A. Edison
#46. The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in.
Thomas A. Edison
#47. Genius defined: of inspiration 1% percent, of perspiration, 99%.
Thomas A. Edison
#48. Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble, I should judge, to lie with the schools.
Thomas A. Edison
#49. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward.
Thomas A. Edison
#50. Life's most soothing things are a child's goodnight and sweet music.
Thomas A. Edison
#51. My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.
Michael J. Saylor
#52. The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.
Dave Barry
#53. I would rather have one man with enthusiasm working with me than ten who are complacent.
Thomas A. Edison
#55. There cannot be overproduction of anything which men and women want. And their wants are unlimited, except by the size of their stomachs.
Thomas A. Edison
#57. An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.
Thomas A. Edison
#58. Before you reject an idea, find at least five good things about it.
Thomas A. Edison
#59. It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.
Thomas A. Edison
#60. We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
Thomas A. Edison
#61. I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
Thomas A. Edison
#64. I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla.
David Lynch
#65. The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.
Thomas A. Edison
#68. I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.
Thomas A. Edison
#69. Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.
Thomas A. Edison
#71. If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, 'Candle-making industry threatened'.
Newt Gingrich
#72. There seems to be no limit to which some men will go to avoid the labor of thinking. Thinking is hard work.
Thomas A. Edison
#74. Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
Thomas A. Edison
#75. I am much less interested in what is called God's word than in God's deeds. All bibles are man-made.
Thomas A. Edison
#76. Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
Thomas A. Edison
#77. Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
Thomas A. Edison
#78. 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.
Thomas A. Edison
#79. My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions ... . The dove is my emblem ... . I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it ... . I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill ... .
Thomas A. Edison
#80. There's a poster with Thomas Edison's quote: GENIUS IS 1 PERCENT INSPIRATION AND 99 PERCENT PERSPIRATION.
Lauren Oliver
#82. Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we're just trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison
#84. The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.
Thomas A. Edison
#86. I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.
Thomas A. Edison
#87. My success is due more to my ability to work continuously on one thing without stopping than to any other single quality.
Thomas A. Edison
#88. The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan's principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.
Thomas A. Edison
#90. The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.
Thomas A. Edison
#91. Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
Thomas A. Edison
#92. The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success.
Thomas A. Edison
#93. Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.
Marc Guggenheim
#94. The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.
Thomas A. Edison
#97. I am a vegetarian as well as a passionate anti-alcoholic, because I can thus make better use of my brain.
Thomas A. Edison
#98. I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.
Steve Jobs
#99. I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.
Thomas A. Edison
#100. The greatest discoveries will be along spiritual lines. This is the field where miracles are going to happen. Spiritual power is the greatest underdeveloped power and has the greatest future.
Thomas A. Edison
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