Top 200 Thomas A. Edison Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.”

— Thomas A. Edison

202. “In creating technology for ourselves we created it for the world.”

— Thomas A. Edison

203. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

204. “The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan’s principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.”

— Thomas A. Edison

205. “If I had not had so much ambition and not tried to do so many things, I probably would have been happier, but less useful.”

— Thomas A. Edison

206. “Friendship is the heaven of life.”

— Thomas A. Edison

207. “The dove is my emblem.”

— Thomas A. Edison

208. “Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

209. “To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .”

— Thomas A. Edison

210. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

211. “Youth doesn’t take advice.”

— Thomas A. Edison

212. “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 A. Edison

213. “I was at the foot of my class.”

— Thomas A. Edison

214. “The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.”

— Thomas A. Edison

215. “All bibles are man-made.”

— Thomas A. Edison

216. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

217. “The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder – deserted, motionless, dead.”

— Thomas A. Edison

218. “Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something...”

— Thomas A. Edison

219. “I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.”

— Thomas A. Edison

220. “Baseball is the greatest of American games. Some say football, but it is my firm belief, and it shall always be, that baseball has no superior.”

— Thomas A. Edison

221. “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 inventor.”

— Thomas A. Edison

222. “Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.”

— Thomas A. Edison

223. “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 A. Edison

224. “Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward.”

— Thomas A. Edison

225. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

226. “It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!”

— Thomas A. Edison

227. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

228. “I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living – our dread of coming to an end.”

— Thomas A. Edison

229. “No Such Thing as Bad Results.”

— Thomas A. Edison

230. “I love great music and art, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.”

— Thomas A. Edison

231. “I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!”

— Thomas A. Edison

232. “Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.”

— Thomas A. Edison

233. “It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

234. “Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.”

— Thomas A. Edison

235. “As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.”

— Thomas A. Edison

236. “Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.”

— Thomas A. Edison

237. “I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.”

— Thomas A. Edison

238. “Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.”

— Thomas A. Edison

239. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 foundations and individual donors whose priorities don’t align with my organization’s.”

— Thomas A. Edison

240. “I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.”

— Thomas A. Edison

241. “An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.”

— Thomas A. Edison

242. “I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.”

— Thomas A. Edison

243. “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.”

— Thomas A. Edison

244. “They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.”

— Thomas A. Edison