Top 200 Thomas A. Edison Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “What you are will show in what you do.”

— Thomas A. Edison

102. “I have determined that there is no market for talking pictures.”

— Thomas A. Edison

103. “Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.”

— Thomas A. Edison

104. “I think that Ingersoll had all the attributes of a perfect man, and, in my opinion, no finer personality ever existed. Judging from the past, I cannot help thinking that the intention of the Supreme Intelligence that rules the world is to ultimately make such a type of man universal.”

— Thomas A. Edison

105. “A genius is a talented person who does his homework.”

— Thomas A. Edison

106. “The money one gets for selling one’s soul is always spent in deadening one’s conscience, so the net gain at the end of a lifetime is no greater than if the diabolic bargain had not been struck.”

— Thomas A. Edison

107. “Radio is just a fashion contrivance that will soon die out. It is obvious that there never will be invented a proper receiver!”

— Thomas A. Edison

108. “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

— Thomas A. Edison

109. “The First 40 hours of work per week are for survival. Everything after that is for success.”

— Thomas A. Edison

110. “The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.”

— Thomas A. Edison

111. “I have better use for my brain than to poison it with alcohol. To put alcohol in the human brain is like putting sand in the bearings of an engine.”

— Thomas A. Edison

112. “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

— Thomas A. Edison

113. “I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.”

— Thomas A. Edison

114. “The inventor can’t do it all, you’ve got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.”

— Thomas A. Edison

115. “Work while others are wishing.”

— Thomas A. Edison

116. “A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.”

— Thomas A. Edison

117. “Being busy does not always mean real work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

118. “Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.”

— Thomas A. Edison

119. “I never view mistakes as failures. They are simply opportunities to find out what doesn’t work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

120. “The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.”

— Thomas A. Edison

121. “Success is based on imagination plus ambition and the will to work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

122. “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”

— Thomas A. Edison

123. “My mother was the making of me. She was so true and so sure of me, I felt that I had someone to live for – someone I must not disappoint. The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me.”

— Thomas A. Edison

124. “As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.”

— Thomas A. Edison

125. “A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.”

— Thomas A. Edison

126. “The endeavor to change universal power by selfish supplication I do not believe in.”

— Thomas A. Edison

127. “The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it.”

— Thomas A. Edison

128. “The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus...”

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Thomas A. Edison

130. “There seems to be no limit to which some men will go to avoid the labor of thinking. Thinking is hard work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

131. “The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.”

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Thomas A. Edison

133. “I’ve realized that most of my best ideas have followed a good night’s sleep.”

— Thomas A. Edison

134. “Sticking to it is the genius.”

— Thomas A. Edison

135. “I start where the last man left off.”

— Thomas A. Edison

136. “I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom.”

— Thomas A. Edison

137. “Personally, I enjoy working about 18 hours a day. Besides the short catnaps I take each day, I average about four to five hours of sleep per night.”

— Thomas A. Edison

138. “Failure is the most effective technique to optimize strategic planning, implementation and processes.”

— Thomas A. Edison

139. “What is a college? An institute of learning. What is a business? An institute of learning. Life, itself, is an institute of learning.”

— Thomas A. Edison

140. “I think work is the world’s greatest fun.”

— Thomas A. Edison

141. “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”

— Thomas A. Edison

142. “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 A. Edison

143. “From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.”

— Thomas A. Edison

144. “I’ve never made a mistake. I’ve only learned from experience.”

— Thomas A. Edison

145. “The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.”

— Thomas A. Edison

146. “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.”

— Thomas A. Edison

147. “Do the thing and the power will come.”

— Thomas A. Edison

148. “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 A. Edison

149. “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”

— Thomas A. Edison

150. “None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”

— Thomas A. Edison