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

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.

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

Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.

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

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

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals - they are mere aggregates of cells.

THOMAS EDISON, interview, "Thomas A. Edison on Immortality", The Columbian Magazine, January 1911

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

There are great minds in the pulpits. If they would stop declaring the unprovable, and give their time to finding what is really Truth, the world would move more rapidly. Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.

THOMAS EDISON, interview, "Thomas A. Edison on Immortality", The Columbian Magazine, January 1911

The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious.

THOMAS EDISON, interview, "Thomas A. Edison on Immortality", The Columbian Magazine, January 1911

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