James Dyson Quotes

101 James Dyson Quotes (Sir James Dyson Quotes)

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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

With the Dual Cyclone’s see through bin, everyone said it would never sell. People did not want to look at the crap they had sucked out of the carpet… But the very disadvantage is what gives it its magic. People look at it and say, ‘My God, it works!’
James Dyson

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum 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. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had.
James Dyson

Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.
James Dyson

The key to success is failure… Success is made of 99 percent failure.
James Dyson

My own success has been in observing objects in daily use which, it was always assumed, could not be improved.
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

You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant.
James Dyson

In the wider picture there is really not so great a difference between a rampaging industrial giant trying to sue you out of business, and a hulking great fifteen-year-old trying to knock you off a rock or duck you in the sea.
James Dyson

I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears on them.
James Dyson



I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.
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

There’s a terrible moment when failure is staring you in the face. And actually if you persevere a bit longer you’ll start to climb out of it.
James Dyson

I like the idea of a child in the twenty-first century telling his friends he can’t come out for a bit because, ‘Mum wants me to dyson my room’, long after my bones have crumbled and I am no more than a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines.
James Dyson

It is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort. So it has proved with me.
James Dyson

We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But 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. Ask the Japanese.
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

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

[On developing a product the works better and looks better than existing ones.] It is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one’s financial health as simply following the herd.
James Dyson

I have been a misfit throughout my professional life…
James Dyson



Misfits are not born or made, they make themselves.
James Dyson

The trick is not to keep looking over your shoulder at others, or to worry, even as you begin a project, that it is not going to be the best possible example of its kind. As long as it works, and it is exciting, people will follow you.
James Dyson

In business you will be wrong, by and large, 50 percent of the time. The trick is to recognise when you have gone wrong and correct the damage – not to worry, at the moment of making the decision, whether it is the right one.
James Dyson

Inventions generate further inventions.
James Dyson

The domestic appliance industry is dominated by the multinational companies which all know what their rivals are doing and which have no interest in upsetting the status quo. In principle, today’s washing machines are very much the same as when they were invented. The whole area of domestic appliances is ripe for technological innovation and new product.
James Dyson

It really was no miracle, what happened was just this…
James Dyson

The funny thing about the story of the Dyson Dual Cyclone is that I knew it would turn out like this from the very beginning. Despite all the setbacks, the lawsuits and cash crises, the interminable patenting processes, the ridicule, bad feeling, and doubt, the rippers-off and the clingers-on (outnumbered, sadly, by the rippers), I always knew, deep down, that everything would come up smelling of… well, of something better than Shake ‘n’ Vac.
James Dyson

It isn’t a pretty thing, writing a book about oneself…
James Dyson

My motivation never had anything to do with a need to see my name on a book.
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



There were twenty years of debt, personal overdraft liabilities, at times, of millions of pounds. Four years ago [1993] I came out of the dark, and now I head a company turning over 101 million pounds. Most bizarrely, it all happened rather without anyone noticing.
James Dyson

[On the Dyson Dual Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner] There have been no free air tickets with the Dual Cyclone. It all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine; because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before; and because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked.
James Dyson

The vacuum cleaner discovered what life was really about only after the cyclone arrived. For a hundred years it had remained essentially unchanged, since the first prototype stopped sucking after ten minutes and just pushed the dirt around the room, and the first bag burst on a carpet.
James Dyson

If anyone was going to step in and shake this global farrago up a bit, it was very unlikely to be me, an Englishman, who wasn’t a qualified engineer, without even a physics O Level to my name, riding on the crest of one moment of Edisonian illumination. And yet that was how it turned out.
James Dyson

Dyson products have made over 101 million pounds [In 1997], and Dyson, the company, has become the fastest-growing manufacturing company in the country – and all in a couple of years, very quietly, from a forty-something former art student who didn’t know a ball-bearing from a Barings Bank.
James Dyson

The look of the product, the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another, is still closest to my heart.
James Dyson

By lateral thinking – the ‘Edisonian approach’ – it is possible to arrive, empirically, at an advance.
James Dyson

My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape…
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

[On English industry attitudes to development and design in 1997] Our attitude to development and designers is blighted by short-termism. You have to show a quick turnaround and immediate profit.
James Dyson



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