Thomas Edison Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Thomas Edison
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

Thomas Edison
Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's...scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!

Thomas Edison
I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived on it.

Thomas Edison
After being asked by M. A. Rosanoff what laboratory rules Edison want him to observe:
Hell, there are no rules here — we're trying to accomplish something.

Thomas Edison
I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

Thomas Edison
If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

Thomas Edison
Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.

Thomas Edison
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.
Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales.

Thomas Edison
The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.

Thomas Edison
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. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding.

Thomas Edison
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison
For most of my life I refused to work at any problem unless its solution seemed to be capable of being put to commercial use.

Thomas Edison
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions

Thomas Edison
I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.

Thomas Edison
We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have — everything — favors the idea of what religionists call the "Hereafter." Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

Thomas Edison
The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

Thomas Edison
I am much less interested in what is called God's word than in God's deeds. All bibles are man-made.

Thomas Edison
I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

Thomas Edison