Thomas Alva Edison: 10 quotes on his birthday

Thomas Alva Edison's "Wizard of Menlo Park" nickname was well-deserved. His trial-and-error approach to invention at his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory resulted in more than 1,000 new patents, the most famous of which is the electric lightbulb. Edison was very open about his belief in hard work, which he expressed in aphorisms like these included in "Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists" by James Geary. To commemorate Edison's 165th birthday on February 11, here are 10 favorite quotes.

1. The value of sweat

By Levin C. Handy (per http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04326) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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