Top 70 James Dyson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Success is made of 99% failure.”

— James Dyson

2. “Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.”

— James Dyson

3. “Fear is always a good motivator.”

— James Dyson

4. “There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.”

— James Dyson

5. “Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.”

— James Dyson

6. “I just think things should work properly.”

— James Dyson

7. “As an engineer I’m constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.”

— James Dyson

8. “Successes teach you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do.”

— James Dyson

9. “What I’ve learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you’re hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.”

— James Dyson

10. “I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.”

— James Dyson

11. “Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.”

— James Dyson

12. “In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn’t work well.”

— James Dyson

13. “Life is a mountain of solvable problems and I enjoy that.”

— James Dyson

14. “Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.”

— James Dyson

15. “You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.”

— James Dyson

16. “If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.”

— James Dyson

17. “Don’t listen to experts.”

— James Dyson

18. “So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.”

— James Dyson

19. “Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.”

— James Dyson

20. “The way the world is going, it’s technology driven. And it isn’t just driven by the old super powers, it’s driven by the far east and new emerging economies.”

— James Dyson

21. “Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It’s considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.”

— James Dyson

22. “If you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.”

— James Dyson

23. “After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology.”

— James Dyson

24. “As a modern employer you have to treat people well.”

— James Dyson

25. “Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.”

— James Dyson

26. “If robots are to clean our homes, they’ll have to do it better than a person.”

— James Dyson

27. “I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.”

— James Dyson

28. “Britain’s great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we’re not using it.”

— James Dyson

29. “Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right, let’s give it another go.”

— James Dyson

30. “Emerging markets are hugely important.”

— James Dyson

31. “At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.”

— James Dyson

32. “The important thing is to learn from mistakes – something graduates are adept at. Our graduate engineers are working on new technology – from uncharted applications for our digital motor, to a new take on the hand dryer. With an unhindered mind, nothing is off limits.”

— James Dyson

33. “We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don’t just try to make money out of money.”

— James Dyson

34. “All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers.”

— James Dyson

35. “Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope.”

— James Dyson

36. “I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don’t necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.”

— James Dyson

37. “Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.”

— James Dyson

38. “The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.”

— James Dyson

39. “I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you’ll be very highly paid once you’ve got them.”

— James Dyson

40. “Learning by trial and error, or experimentation, can be exciting, the lessons learned deeply engrained. Learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. Failure is to be welcomed rather than avoided. It is a part of learning. It should not be feared by the engineer or scientist or indeed by anyone else.”

— James Dyson

41. “The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.”

— James Dyson

42. “Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth.”

— James Dyson

43. “I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.”

— James Dyson

44. “In the digital age of ‘overnight’ success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.”

— James Dyson

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45. “If you invent something, you’re doing a creative act. It’s like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It’s years of your life, it’s your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.”

— James Dyson

46. “Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That’s what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there’s nothing in it. There’s no interest, you learn nothing actually.”

— James Dyson

47. “When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.”

— James Dyson

48. “Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.”

— James Dyson

49. “Reality TV is anything but.”

— James Dyson

50. “One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.”

— James Dyson

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