Thomas Edison Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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

Thomas Edison
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison
We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.

Thomas Edison
The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell.

Thomas Edison
Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters — seldom in any school of writing.

Thomas Edison
I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.
Variant: I find out what the world needs; then I go ahead and try to invent it,

Thomas Edison
Everyone steals in commerce and industry. I've stolen a lot, myself. But I know how to steal! They don't know how to steal!

Thomas Edison
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Thomas Edison
The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty — who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause — can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

Thomas Edison
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.

Thomas Edison
The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

Thomas Edison
Ninety eight per cent of genius is hard work. As for genius being inspired, inspiration is in most cases another word for perspiration.

Thomas Edison
I never did a day's work in my life, it was all fun.

Thomas Edison
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.

Thomas Edison
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 Edison
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.

Thomas Edison
Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody'll ever use it. Too dangerous!
Said to Nikola Tesla

Thomas Edison
Many great discoveries remain to be made. We must start anew in many things, rejecting the old theories as Einstein did, building along new lines as Einstein did, fearing nothing any more than Einstein did.

Thomas Edison
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 Edison
We tried some experiments in mind reading which were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others minds, twould stop civilization and everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or hundred thousand centuries when mankind have become perfect by evolution then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to the state.

Thomas Edison
The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.

Thomas Edison
The brain can be developed just the same as the muscles can be developed, if on will only take the pains to train the mind to think.

Thomas Edison
The only way to keep ahead of the procession is to experiment. If you don't, the other fellow will. 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.

Thomas Edison
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 Edison
Fish seem to be rather conservative around this bay, one seldom catches enough to form the fundamental basis for a lie. Dante left out one of the torments of Hades — I could imagine a doomed mortal made to untangle wet fish lines forever. Everybody lost patience at the stupidity of the fish in not coming forward promptly to be murdered.

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

Thomas Edison
The stomach is the only part of man which can be fully satisfied. The yearning of man's brain for new knowledge and experience and for more pleasant and comfortable surroundings never can be completely met. It is an appetite which cannot be appeased.

Thomas Edison
When I want to discover something, I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past — that's what all these books in the library are for. I see what has been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I gather the data of many thousands of experiments as a starting point, and then I make a thousand more.

Thomas Edison
I am going to have a sign put up all over my plant, reading "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."

Thomas Edison
An alternating-current high-voltage wire gets loose, it could kill a man as quick as a bolt of lightning. Direct current is safe. Can't develop more than one hundred and ten volts. Working on alternating current is a complete waste of time.
Said to Nikola Tesla

Thomas Edison