Thomas Edison Quotes

59 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
I never did a day's work in my life, it was all fun.

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
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
Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.

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

Thomas Edison
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

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

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 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
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
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
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
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
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