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Quotes by Thomas Alva Edison

  • Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
  • I have not failed. Ive just found 10,000 ways that dont work.
  • To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
  • When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
  • Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
  • Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.
  • Genius is 1 inspiration and 99 perspiration.
  • Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something.
  • There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
  • I am long on ideas, but short on time. I only expect to live only about a hundred years.
  • Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
  • If we did all the things we were capable of doing, We would literally astound ourselves.
  • There is no substitute for hard work.
  • Everything comes to he who hustles while he waits.
  • We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
  • Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
  • Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
  • I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
  • Results Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
  • Great ideas originate in the muscles.
  • Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
  • There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.