Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison~wikipedia

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

• Spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper’s Monthly (September 1932)
• Variants:
• None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
  • Statement in a press conference (1929), as quoted in Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel & Charles Lindbergh (1987) by James D. Newton, p. 24.
• Variant forms without early citation: "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."
  "Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Tesla quote on Edison

• If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.
  • Nikola Tesl
• My retort on Tesla’s quote. 
• If Edison knows the theory and the calculation, he would be working in a keyless prison confined by the limitation theory, man created glorify themselves.
• The mantra should be think outside the box, man made rules are made to be broken. Most do not stand the test of time. Those that do, follow the Law of Nature, the Universal Intelligence.

Bea

Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety nine percent spontaneous creativity.

Creativity is Genuis meeting Preparation.

Find a need that everyone wants in society and invent. Need of mankind.

Edison quoted as saying"

I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe. I called it Universal Intelligence in today’s language because Supreme has an incorrect connotation like Supreme Pizza or Supremacy as in KKK.

He does not like the word ‘soul’,

• The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
  • This has been reprinted many times with slight variations on the wording; it is part of a much larger quote directly from Edison published in 1903:

Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
They may even discover the germ of old age. I don’t predict it, but it might be by the sacrifice of animal life human life could be prolonged.
Surgery, diet, antiseptics — these three are the vital things of the future in preserving the health of humanity. There were never so many able, active minds at work on the problems of diseases as now, and all their discoveries are tending to the simple truth — that you can’t improve on nature.

• As quoted in "Wizard Edison" in The Newark Advocate (2 January 1903), p. 1 according to reasearch by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at snopes.com

**He was correct on medicine that prevention is better than cure, and most meds are to mask the symptom and not to heal. the Universal Intelligence knows how to heal anything that is alive and hurt. It is the Law of Nature. Natural and Holistic approach may be the way of the future.

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

• Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages
  • Cited in Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor by Sarah Miller Caldicott, Michael J. Gelb, page 37, [1].

Agreed that we should show compassion to all living things.

• It is very beautiful over there! 
• (the bottom explanation describes the soul which cannot be measured yet today by scientific instruments.)
  
  • These have sometimes been reported as his last words, but were actually spoken several days before his death, as he awoke from a nap, gazing upwards, as reported by his physician Dr. Hubert S. Howe, in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World’s Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison’s Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295

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

• There is a great directing head of people and things — a Supreme Being who looks after the destinies of the world.
  I am convinced that the body is made up of entities that are intelligent and are directed by this Higher Power. When one cuts his finger, I believe it is the intelligence of these entities which heals the wound. When one is sick, it is the intelligence of these entities which brings convalescence. You know that there are living cells in the body so tiny that the microscope cannot find them at all. The entities that give life and soul to the human body are finer still and lie infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When these entities leave the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder — deserted, motionless and dead.

I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.

• The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 128, No. 4 (October 1921), p. 520

** God is a frame of mind, and all bibles are interpreted by his believers.

I liked this quote the best.

I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.

• As quoted in American Greats (1999) Edited by Robert A. Wilson and Stanley Marcus, p. 70

** I will live by this mantra.