Thomas Alva Edison

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.

— Thomas Alva Edison men

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.

— Thomas Alva Edison truth

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.

— Thomas Alva Edison future

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

— Thomas Alva Edison inspiration

If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. ... It is absurd to say our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.

— Thomas Alva Edison people

I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!

— Thomas Alva Edison power

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. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding.

— Thomas Alva Edison soul

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

— Thomas Alva Edison hope

Discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I'll show you a failure.

— Thomas Alva Edison failure

I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.

— Thomas Alva Edison believe

We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have — everything — favors the idea of what religionists call the "Hereafter." Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

— Thomas Alva Edison religion

It is very beautiful over there!

— Thomas Alva Edison beautiful

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.

— Thomas Alva Edison

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

— Thomas Alva Edison people

There is a great directing head of people and things — a Supreme Being who looks after the destinies of the world. I am convinced that the body is made up of entities that are intelligent and are directed by this Higher Power. When one cuts his finger, I believe it is the intelligence of these entities which heals the wound. When one is sick, it is the intelligence of these entities which brings convalescence. You know that there are living cells in the body so tiny that the microscope cannot find them at all. The entities that give life and soul to the human body are finer still and lie infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When these entities leave the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder — deserted, motionless and dead.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.

— Thomas Alva Edison failure

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. ... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

— Thomas Alva Edison art

So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk.

— Thomas Alva Edison religion

I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.

— Thomas Alva Edison world

If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

— Thomas Alva Edison

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

— Thomas Alva Edison imagination

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

— Thomas Alva Edison you

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 Alva Edison self

Hell, there are no rules here — we're trying to accomplish something.

— Thomas Alva Edison rules

I never did a day's work in my life, it was all fun.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived on it.

— Thomas Alva Edison success

Essay in The Diary and Sundry Observations (1948) edited by Dagobert D. Runes -

— Thomas Alva Edison sun

— Thomas Alva Edison success

has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal ofin making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

In flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable.recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again.

— Thomas Alva Edison power

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. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings,and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales.

— Thomas Alva Edison truth

Many a person who could not comprehend , and would be puzzled by , 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. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters — seldom in any school of writing.

— Thomas Alva Edison writing

He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds — or on persons devoted to them — have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life. Whentermed Tom Paine a "dirty little atheist" he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished.

— Thomas Alva Edison life

The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty — who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause — can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

— Thomas Alva Edison men

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