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

“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.”

“I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.”

“Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.".”

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

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“We are the prisoners of ideas.”

“Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.”

“Death has nothing to do with going away.The sun setsThe moon setsBut they are not gone.”

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.”

“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

“I'll teach you differences.”

“Plutus himself,That knows the tinct and multiplying med'cine,Hath not in nature's mystery more scienceThan I have in this ring.”

“I say, without characters, fame lives long.”

“Tongues I'll hang on every treeThat shall civil sayings show. . . .”

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”