Thomas A. Edison Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“There is far more opportunity than there is ability.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.”

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

“I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.”

“I failed my way to success.”

“The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me.”

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

“There is always a better way.”

“The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.”

“A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work."”

“It is remarkable to what lengths people will go to avoid thought.”

“Ideas without execution are hallucinations.”

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

“An idea is something that won't work unless you do.”

“The brain can be developed just the same as the musclescan be developed, if on will only take the pains to trainthe mind to think.”

“Every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward”

“His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.”

“Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”

“The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success.”

“Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.”