Thomas A. Edison Work Quotations

Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's ... scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!

There is no subsitute for hard work.

Nothing that's good works by itself, you've got to make the damn thing work.

I never did anything worth doing entirely by accident. . . Almost none of my inventions came about totally by accident. They were achieved by having trained myself to endure and tolerate hard work.

Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don't work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they'll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they'll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they've got it half right, because eventually they do wake up.

Genius is not inspired. Inspiration is perspiration.

If I could solve all the problems myself, I would.

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.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Success is the result of hard work.

Education isn't play--and it can't be made to look like play. It is hard, hard work. But it can be made interesting work.

I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.

Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work.

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

Barring serious accidents, if you are not preoccupied with worry and you work hard, you can look forward to a reasonably lengthy existence.... Its not the hard work that kills, its the worrying that kills.

The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness... Unfortunately, many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. I have far more respect for the person with a single idea who gets there than for the person with a thousand ideas who does nothing.

Nearly every man who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. that's not the place to become discouraged.

There is no substitute for hard work.

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

I never did anything worth doing by accident; nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work

I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.