Top 874 Thomas Edison Quotes & Sayings

Alexander Graham Bell brought us the telephone. He owns the telephones in the buildings. Thomas Edison owns the lightbulb. Whether they took it and did things to improve it, he's the guy. Now on the dance floor, that belongs to Chubby Checker.

Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

Thomas Edison reads not for entertainment but to increase his store of knowledge. He sucks in information as eagerly as the bee sucks honey from flowers. The whole world, so to speak, pours its wisdom into his mind. He regards it as a criminal waste of time to go through the slow and painful ordeal of ascertaining things for one's self if these same things have already been ascertained and made available by others. In Edison's mind knowledge is power.

What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla.

Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.

We forget to thank the scientists that began these musical inventions and systems. The guy that invented the phonograph and gramophone - Thomas Edison!

Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.

The most famous self-made man in the world today is our own Edison. Talk with Mr. Edison and he will tell you he owes much if not most of his success to omnivorous reading. Forbes is one of his favorite publications. How closely he reads it can be gathered from a letter just received from him in which he asks the editor to forward a long analytical letter to the writer of a series of articles which contained two figures Mr. Edison questions, and he wants to know exactly on what authority or investigation they were based. Both letters were the product of Mr. Edison and were signed by him.

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."

I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

I am in exact accord with the belief of Thomas Edison that spirit is immortal, that there is a continuing center of character in each personality. But I don't know what spirit is, nor matter either. I suspect they are forms of the same thing. I never could see anything in this reputed antagonism between spirit and matter. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life.

I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.

My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

Innovation really is the life blood of our American economy... looking back at the stories of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers, you look at emergence to technology innovation and what it has done for our economy. We need to continue that.

Home cooks are finding inspiration in the past, digging up centuries-old recipes more familiar to the likes of Thomas Jefferson than Thomas Keller.

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names.

I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine. And believe me, you are no Thomas Jefferson. (at 1992 Republican party convention, referring to Bill Clinton)

Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

If Thomas Edison had gone to business school, we would all be reading by larger candles.

When Edison first started out with his "crazy" idea for the light bulb, skeptics were unmoved. They called Thomas Edison a con man and taunted him to prove his bulb could really work. Despite the naysayers, Edison pushed on, demonstrating the importance of sticking with his "crazy" idea which would go on to turn him into one of the world's most well-known entrepreneurs. The key here is to fan the foolish fire no matter what!

I was really proud that I was named after Thomas Edison and wanted to be called Edson. I thought Pele sounded horrible. It was a rubbish name. Edson sounded so much more serious and important.

If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, 'Candle-making industry threatened'.

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Thomas Edison I don't design clothes, I design dreams.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

Thomas Edison dreamed of a lamp that could be operated by electricity, began where he stood to put his dream into action, and despite more than ten thousand failures, he stood by that dream until he made it a physical reality. Practical dreamers do not quit.

Long before my days at ESPN, the 'Philadelphia Inquirer,' or the 'New York Daily News' before that, I was a student at Thomas A. Edison Vocational and Technical High.

Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.

Work outside of school hours was a necessity at an early age, and with such time as I had I turned toward interests of my own devising, making things, experimenting, and planning for the future. I had read of Thomas Alva Edison and other successful inventors, and the idea of making an invention appealed to me as one of the few available means to accomplish a change in one's economic status, while at the same time bringing to focus my interest in technical things and making it possible to make a contribution to society as well.

Just think how much poorer we would be today if the world would have had half as many people in the 19th century as it actually did. You can get rid of Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur; take your pick.

He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.

What made Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein such creative geniuses? It wasn't reading books or watching YouTube talks about How To Be More Creative, that's for sure... If startling insights could be systematically arrived at, they wouldn't be startling. The best you can do is to create a conducive environment: put in the hours; take time to daydream; avoid mind-corroding substances.

That Edison or Lincoln could have been Edison or Lincoln after four years of Harvard is improbable.

Fall forward. Here's what I mean: Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in his career - the most in the history of baseball. But you don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn't either - because number 1,001 was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? . . . The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. . . . If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.

The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence … The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation.

Without doubt, Thomas Edison is my greatest contemporary.

One of my other nicknames was Thomas Edison, because I invented so many moves.

I had to do four years of undergraduate. I went to Thomas Edison State University in Trenton.

Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas "Fscking" Edison.

If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... [J]ust a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

One of my favorite quotes from Thomas Edison is, "If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would astound ourselves." I believe leadership is a journey of learning and growing.

Thomas Edison had great visions (for lights, music players, movies, etc.) but he knew they didn't count until he could make them work. His statement that creativity is 99% perspiration makes that point. Consider how much time he spent trying to make a synthetic rubber material for tires and never stopped trying but he never succeeded.

I'm a junior, so my dad's name is Thomas Rhett Akins as well. So literally, from the day I was born, it was Thomas Rhett. It wasn't Thomas or Rhett, it was Thomas Rhett.

To me, Arnold was a pioneer in the spirit of Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, while Tiger is a pioneer in the spirit of Bill Gates.

A teacher sent the following note home with a six-year-old boy 'He is too stupid to learn.' That boy was Thomas A. Edison.

The outer is easier, and the outer is objective. For example, one man, Thomas Alva Edison, discovers electricity and the whole of humanity uses it; there is no need for everyone to discover it again and again. Inner growth is a totally different phenomenon. A Gautama Buddha may become enlightened, but that does not mean that everybody else becomes enlightened. Each individual has to find the truth for him or herself.

The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

Thomas A. Edison was once reluctantly persuaded by his wife to attend one of the big social functions of the season in New York. At last the inventor managed to escape the crowd of people vying for his attention, and sat alone unnoticed in a corner. Edison kept looking at his watch with a resigned expression on his face. A friend edged near to him unnoticed and heard the inventor mutter to himself with a sigh, "If there were only a dog here!"

Mr Edison gave America just what was needed at that moment in history. They say that when people think of me, they think of my assembly line. Mr. Edison, you built an assembly line which brought together the genius of invention, science and industry.

It's a failure only if you don't get anything out of it, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work; yet we have lights today.

The Wright brothers didn't contemplate the staying on the ground of things. Alexander Graham Bell didn't contemplate the noncommunication of things. Thomas Edison didn't contemplate the darkness of things. In order to float an idea into your reality, you must be willing to do a somersault into the unconceivable and land on your feet, contemplating what you want instead of what you don't have.