Thomas A. Edison Quotes

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

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.

It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough.

I have not failed 10,000 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. He tries and fails maybe a 1000 times. If he succeeds once, then he's in.

If anything is worth trying at all, it's worth trying at least 10 times.

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.

The most successful people in American life are those that have had horrific failures and have come back, done it again and again until they got it right, whether it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

If the first plan which you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan; if this new plan fails to work, replace it in turn with still another, and so on, until you find a plan which does work. Right here is the point at which the majority of men meet with failure, because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist.

The value of experimentation is not the trying. It's the trying again after the experiment fails.

Nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly

Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.

The person who fails the most wins.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.