James Dyson is a British inventor, industrial designer & entrepreneur who is renowned for his innovative approach to problem-solving through the use of cutting-edge technologies.
Born on May 2, 1947, in Cromer, Norfolk, England, Dyson developed his design prowess at Gresham’s schools and the Royal College of Art.
His crowning achievement, the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, revolutionized the industry with its unique cyclonic separation principle.
Dyson Ltd, his multinational corporation, focuses on technological solutions, with a diverse research scope encompassing robotics, AI, machine learning, solid-state battery development and material science.
With engineers and scientists forming half of Dyson’s global team, the company is now a dominant force in 84 international markets.
Related: Samuel Morse Quotes from the American Inventor and Garrett Morgan Quotes from the Inventor of the Gas Mask
Dyson’s commercial success strengthens his mission to reignite the spirit of invention in Britain, advocating for the recognition and elevation of engineering and technical innovation in British society.
He has penned several books, detailing his inventive journey and championing innovation.
I have made a compilation of the top quotes from James Dyson for you.
Best James Dyson Quotes
We humans are astonishingly inventive. ~ James Dyson.
One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini. ~ James Dyson.
Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that. ~ James Dyson.
The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property. ~ James Dyson.
Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving. ~ James Dyson.
Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something. ~ James Dyson.
I employ brilliant young graduates with no experience at all. I want free-thinkers who can take the company forward, and have revolutionary ideas. ~ James Dyson.
The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you’re totally free. ~ James Dyson.
You don’t get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer. ~ James Dyson.
Using your hands and brains to solve problems is an enormous creative challenge. ~ James Dyson.
Famous James Dyson Quotes
The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it’s an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry. ~ James Dyson.
A decent working prototype in four years was actually quite speedy work. It sounds a bit Hare and the Tortoise, but those old fairytales knew what was going on. ~ James Dyson.
Anyone can become an expert at anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners. ~ James Dyson.
Never, ever give up. Make it very clear what you are doing and why you are doing it, publicly and internally. Sometimes you cannot make a big leap but only lots of little improvements. In the end it adds up to a big improvement. ~ James Dyson.
I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. ~ James Dyson.
Britain’s great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we’re not using it. ~ James Dyson.
Successes teach you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do. ~ James Dyson.
I own every share of my company, and I don’t want to sell any of it. ~ James Dyson.
Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It’s considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true. ~ James Dyson.
If you invent something, you’re doing a creative act. It’s like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It’s years of your life, it’s your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment. ~ James Dyson.
Inspiring James Dyson Quotes
One little rule I do have is that when you react to a situation you should probably think what you should do and what you shouldn’t. And almost certainly do what you shouldn’t do. ~ James Dyson.
We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it. ~ James Dyson.
Like the Japanese, we are never satisfied with the product, and are always trying to improve it. ~ James Dyson.
I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you’ll be very highly paid once you’ve got them. ~ James Dyson.
Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products. ~ James Dyson.
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes. ~ James Dyson.
Don’t listen to experts. ~ James Dyson.
Misfits are not born or made, they make themselves. ~ James Dyson.
The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy. ~ James Dyson.
If you didn’t have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can’t copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way. ~ James Dyson.
What all inventions have in common is that they start from a knowledge of what’s already out there. ~ James Dyson.
Inspirational James Dyson Quotes
We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don’t just try to make money out of money. ~ James Dyson.
It is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort. So it has proved with me. ~ James Dyson.
Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right, let’s give it another go. ~ James Dyson.
The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues. ~ James Dyson.
Anger is a good motivator. ~ James Dyson.
We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups. ~ James Dyson.
When you say ‘design,’ everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it’s an emotive word. Everybody thinks it’s how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything. ~ James Dyson.
We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate. ~ James Dyson.
I’m not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths – grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic. ~ James Dyson.
I don’t believe in brands. ~ James Dyson.
Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making. ~ James Dyson.
Motivational James Dyson Quotes
Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us. ~ James Dyson.
China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K. ~ James Dyson.
Companies are not ingenious, it’s the people in them that are. ~ James Dyson.
At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time. ~ James Dyson.
When you can’t compete on cost, compete on quality. ~ James Dyson.
When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had. ~ James Dyson.
What I’ve learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you’re hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner. ~ James Dyson.
The way the world is going, it’s technology driven. And it isn’t just driven by the old super powers, it’s driven by the far east and new emerging economies. ~ James Dyson.
Advertising is the British answer to everything. But that is the way to a fast buck, not real money. ~ James Dyson.
You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. ~ James Dyson.
There is no such things as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence – and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. ~ James Dyson.
Wise James Dyson Quotes
An inventor’s path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches. ~ James Dyson.
I hate science fiction. ~ James Dyson.
The thing about inventing is that it is a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions. In fact, that is where most inventions come from. They very rarely come out of nothing. ~ James Dyson.
I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears on them. ~ James Dyson.
I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level. ~ James Dyson.
As a modern employer you have to treat people well. ~ James Dyson.
Well, I’m rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven’t apparently made them with a great love for what they’re doing. ~ James Dyson.
I could buy companies, tart up their products and put my name on them, but I don’t want to do that. That’s what our competitors do. ~ James Dyson.
Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that’s completely inaccessible. ~ James Dyson.
Well, air-conditioning is not a good thing. ~ James Dyson.
People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them. ~ James Dyson.
Fear is always a good motivator. ~ James Dyson.
Great James Dyson Quotes
Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly. ~ James Dyson.
Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success. ~ James Dyson.
So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want. ~ James Dyson.
Inventions generate further inventions. ~ James Dyson.
China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn’t have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers – the kind of people the U.S. is built upon. ~ James Dyson.
Companies are built, not made. ~ James Dyson.
There’s nothing wrong with things taking time. ~ James Dyson.
I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance. ~ James Dyson.
I don’t particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box – simplify it. ~ James Dyson.
Making an idea actually work and perform well is what inventing is all about. ~ James Dyson.
Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They’re experts in design, engineering and business. ~ James Dyson.
Profound James Dyson Quotes
As an engineer I’m constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them. ~ James Dyson.
The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential. ~ James Dyson.
If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you’ve got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology. ~ James Dyson.
The greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads which they finally give to you because you have done something good. ~ James Dyson.
Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it. ~ James Dyson.
My own success has been in observing objects in daily use which, it was always assumed, could not be improved. ~ James Dyson.
Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports. ~ James Dyson.
You can’t repeat the past. ~ James Dyson.
My interest in film is sort of catholic – apart from science fiction and horror movies, I’ll watch almost everything. ~ James Dyson.
I had bigger fish in mind. And it was time to fry them. ~ James Dyson.
You can teach yourself science… but you can’t necessarily make yourself an artist. ~ James Dyson.
People buy products if they’re better. ~ James Dyson.
Powerful James Dyson Quotes
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth. ~ James Dyson.
In the digital age of ‘overnight’ success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked. ~ James Dyson.
Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don’t need great big vacuums anymore. ~ James Dyson.
Now, we don’t teach children in schools to be creative. We don’t teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box. ~ James Dyson.
I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it. ~ James Dyson.
I do not pretend to offer a ‘how-to’ manual, for many of those exist already. I hope rather to lead by example. ~ James Dyson.
The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes. ~ James Dyson.
You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realized. ~ James Dyson.
