Thomas A. Edison
Genius defined: of inspiration 1% percent, of perspiration, 99%.Collection: Inspiration
When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.Collection: Way
Not only will atomic power be released, but someday we will harness the rise and fall of the tides and imprison the rays of the sun.Collection: Fall
When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right.Collection: Mouths
The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.Collection: Humor
Seeming to do is not doing.Collection: Seeming
It is very beautiful over there. (last words)Collection: Beautiful
My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant - but misdirected - ideas of others.Collection: Motivational
I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Smoking
It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition-and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing that gives out and then that-"Bugs"as such little faults and difficulties are called show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success-or failure-is certainly reached.Collection: Success
Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.Collection: Motivational
Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.Collection: Inspirational
The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness.Collection: Motivational
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph bestCollection: Great Inventions
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.Collection: Book
To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.Collection: Science
Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used used them.Collection: Motivational
I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!Collection: Phrenology
I am afraid of radium and polonium ... I don't want to monkey with them.Collection: Science
Interest is the invention of Satan.Collection: Satan
The Bible of nature is the best damn Bible in the world. Its laws are perfect and grand, and all the prayers in the world can't change them. There is intelligence and law in this world, and there may be supreme intelligence and law, but so far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is all a damned fake.Collection: Prayer
My mother was the making of me.Collection: Funny
I have not failed 10,000 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.Collection: Inspiring
Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.Collection: Simple
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 experimentationCollection: Motivational
An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.Collection: Average
The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me.Collection: Motivational
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 foundations and individual donors whose priorities don't align with my organization's.Collection: Organization
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.Collection: Political
As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.Collection: Lifestyle
It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.Collection: New York
Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.Collection: Inspiration
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 inventorCollection: Names
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.Collection: Personality
It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.Collection: Men
I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator.Collection: Inspirational
Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.Collection: Government
I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.Collection: Light
I am so deaf I am debarred from hearing all the time articulation and have to depend on the judgment of others.Collection: Hearing
If there is a better solution... find it.Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Lying
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.Collection: Motivational
I was at the foot of my class.Collection: Class
Life's most soothing things are a child's goodnight and sweet music.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Book
Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.Collection: Light