Some Quotes by Edison

"Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a 'genius' is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework."

My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions.... The dove is my emblem.... I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it.... I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill....

I readily absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.

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

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it....

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

The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness.....

Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

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

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward....

As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.

Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose...

From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge....

Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation.... Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward!

If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value....

- Edison

Good judgement and experience

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

- Anon

Never

"I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting."

- Mark Twain

98 percent

"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them."

- Lily Tomlin

Our memory

"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Idiot

“He talks like an idiot, and behaves like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

- Groucho Marx

Habit

Habit is a cable. We weave a third of it each day and at last we cannot break it.

- Horace Mann, American Educator, 1796-1859

Democracy vs Dictatorship

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."

- Charles Bukowski

Second Half

"The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Don't discourage

“Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.”

- Bertrand Russell

Self respect

"That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong."

- William J. H. Boetcker

Practical Wisdom

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe, said Abe Lincoln. Astonishing how much profoundly practical wisdom is packaged into that simple declaration. Time spent in sharpening the tool is time well-spent; so is time spent in thinking through a problem and thoroughly understanding the problem before rushing off to solve it. And in most cases, since there is almost nothing new under the sun, there are already known solutions to many problem. So the most efficient method to solve a problem is to first seek the solution that someone may have figured out already.

-Atanu Dey

Give me six hours

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe

- Abraham Lincoln.

Questions

The questions we ask ourselves have a profound effect on the way we think.

- Philip Chandler

Is there life?

Is there life before death?

- Graffito

Boys will be boys

Boys will be boys and so will a lot of middle aged men.

- Ken Hubbard

The natural economic tendency

The natural economic tendency is for resources to move to where they are most productive. Market prices act as signals to bring about these shifts. The market price for computer programmers has soared in recent years. Small, specialized software companies are more effective than the Dilbert sector at using programmers. Thus, they can afford to pay programmers higher wages, while the Dilbert sector cannot. The more complaints that one hears from such firms of a shortage of technical workers, the more confident one can be that market forces are working to allocate technical workers to their most productive uses.

- Arnold Kling

The new industrial state

"So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists in organization. More even than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology."

- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The New Industrial State," p. 16.

Let's see the battle scars then

So let’s see your battle scars then. Show me the wounds you’ve endured as a result of pursuing goals you couldn’t achieve. Let’s see that bankruptcy, that broken heart, the rejection letter, the lawsuit, the divorce, the public humiliation. Show me the total failures, the brutal disappointments, the smack-downs.

- Steve Pavlina

Tha Habit of Reason

Yet another masterpiece by Brand Blanshard:

Then what is thinking? It is this: a directed effort to reach the truth by solving some particular problem that stands in the way.

The first step is to make the problem specific.

The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yourself of that burden.

[The third] step is to develop in foresight the consequences of your proposals.

The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme as a whole.

Life is a succession of big and little crises, and one main aim of education is to supply us with the strategies necessary for dealing with them. Furthermore, dealing with them thoughtfully may become a habit. Indeed, my thesis today is that if you have acquired that habit of reasonableness, you will have acquired the best thing that an education can bestow.

An hour, a day, a life ordered by reflective choice strikes them as gray and dull.

He was so present-minded about what was before his mind that he was absent-minded about what was before his eyes. [about John Dewey]

Why is it that, with all the advantages and with the appeal to reason open to most of us, so few people succeed in guiding their way by thought? The true answer is that each of us is a divided self. A person is a bundle of impulses or drives, of which the drive to know is important but feeble, and the others, especially when acting together, are far more powerful. Why more powerful? The answer is biological.

Now the reason our impulses to feed and fight, to fear and rage, are so hard to control is that their roots are millions of years old in our racial history; the reason foresight and logic are so feeble in restraining them is that their cortical bases are relatively recent, only a few hundred thousand years old; they are therefore relative newcomers in the management of behavior.

One may fall back on the airy line of Walt Whitman and say: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” So what? he would add. Well, that “what” is that you have stopped thinking.

There is not one rule for thinking in religion and another for science; there is one great honest rule for both: Adjust your belief to the evidence.

If you are not a better citizen, a better man or woman, a better member of society, because of the years you have spent here, then either you or the university has fallen down on the job.

Thought is no enemy of feeling; indeed it may itself be driven by a passion for truth, as it was in Einstein, for example, and in his favorite philosopher, Spinoza.

That excellent English critic F. L. Lucas says, “Imagine the greatest man you can think of, in a bad temper; does he still, at the moment, seem great? No. Not even were he Alexander. Real greatness implies balance and restraint.”

I have not heard of an American jailed for being too thoughtful; but our jails are full of people who are there because they surrendered to impulse before they took thought.

The modern Socrates was, I think, Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was three men: one, the man with an old sweater and baggy trousers who stood on a Princeton street corner eating an ice cream cone or helped a little schoolgirl who had heard that he was good at figures; two, the physicist who pursued to the end of that revolutionary trail of thought that ended in the tiny formula E = MC2, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light; and three, the postwar Einstein, who dedicated himself to saving the world that he saw his formula might destroy.

Men like Socrates and Einstein are what William James called “quarto and folio editions of mankind.” You and I are paperbacks.

Democracy and distinction are subtly at war with each other. The pressure of the media and the shrinking of the world are casting our minds into molds. The route to escape is through thought. By taking thought, we can choose our own media, select our own music, create our mental environment; we can surround ourselves with the best that has been thought and said in the world.

India

by Late Benigno Aquino

“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor, where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and an illusion for the many, a land consecrated to democracy but is a land of privilege and rank, a republic educated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.”

- Source not known.

Learn from History

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

- George Bernard Shaw

Government

"Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians."

- Chaster Bowles

Finally

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."

- Rita Mae Brown

Beauty

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"

- Jean Kerr

Two Kinds of Light

"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."

- James Thurber

Act to Feel

It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.

- O. H. Mowrer

Automatic Creative Mechanism

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic creative mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

- Maxwell Maltz

Good Idea

The best way to get a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

- Linus Pauling

Fanaticism

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts, when you have forgotten your aim.

- George Santayana

Ideas

If you are waiting to have a good idea before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas.

- David Allen

Big Things and Small Things

You have got to think about the big things while you are doing the small things so that all the small things go in the right direction.

- Alvin Toffler

Affairs of Life

The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary insuited to control the business of the world.

- James Fenimore Cooper

Enemy

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

- Sally kempton

Vision and Venture

Vision is not enough. It must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.

- Vaclav Havel

Consumer of Time and Energy

This constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.

- Kerry Gleeson

Adjustment

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic without inner trembling.

-Eric Hoffer

Anxiety

Anxiety is caused by lack of control, organization, preparation and action.

- David Kekich

Human Nature

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” “Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow upto the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."

John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)

Vitality

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ignorance and Apathy

"Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."

- William Safire

College

"Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or because they didn't."

- L. L. Henderson

Democracy

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

- George Bernard Shaw