Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits

Not Edison — an anonymous 1890s business motto Unknown In print by March 1889 · the “while he waits” form credited in December 1893 to an unnamed businessman in Erie County, New York
Disputed — a floating American newspaper motto that a 1900s biographer draped over Edison’s boyhood, and that quote books have printed under his name ever since. Free to reuse

Edison did not coin this. Etymologist Barry Popik documents “All things come to him who hustles” in the Kansas City Times of 3 March 1889, and the fuller motto “All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits” in the Cleveland Leader of 3 December 1893, where it is credited to an unnamed businessman in Erie County, New York — and he states flatly that there is no evidence Edison coined the saying (Barry Popik ↗). The Edison label comes from a biography: Francis Arthur Jones’s Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor’s Life narrates, on page 14, that the boy Edison “believed in his own modernized version of the old proverb” — Jones’s sentence about Edison, not a sentence by Edison.

Last verified 7 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits” not Thomas Edison. An anonymous American business motto: "All things come to him who hustles" appears in the Kansas City Times, 3 March 1889, and "All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits" in the Cleveland Leader, 3 December 1893, credited to an unnamed Erie County, New York businessman; this exact wording appears in a Livingston Herald advertisement, 14 March 1895. Francis Arthur Jones's biography "Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life" (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1908), p. 14, attached it to Edison's boyhood as narration — Edison is not quoted saying it. Citations compiled by Barry Popik. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Thomas Edison. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of work, success and hope. Theme: "Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the wording actually comes from

Earliest print, this exact wording
Advertisement, Livingston Herald (Livingston, MT), 14 March 1895, pg. 2, col. 5
Earlier form in print
“All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits” — Cleveland Leader, 3 December 1893, credited to a businessman in Erie county, N. Y.
Attached to Edison in
Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor’s Life
Status
Disputed — Popik finds no evidence Edison coined it

During the time that his application was being considered, for even then he believed in his own modernized version of the old proverb, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits,” he managed to make a few nickels by selling newspapers on the streets. Jones, 1908, p. 14

Read it carefully: the sentence is the biographer’s, not Edison’s. Jones is explaining why a boy waiting on a job application kept working the streets, and he reaches for a motto current in his own day to do it. Edison is not quoted, no occasion is given, and no source is cited — and the same motto was already in American newspapers years before Jones wrote.

Digitized 1908 edition, T. Y. Crowell & Co., New York
Read the page on the Internet Archive
Barry Popik’s citation trail for the motto

The paper trail, in order

  • 3 March 1889 — the Kansas City Times reports that locals rewrite the old proverb for themselves: “‘All things come to him who waits,’ is indorsed by this busy and successful community as a very prettily stated axiomatic virtue. But for themselves they read it: ‘All things come to him who hustles.’” (Barry Popik ↗).
  • 3 December 1893 — the Cleveland Leader runs it as a filler item: “A BUSINESS man in Erie county, N. Y. has prominently displayed in his office the motto, ‘All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits.’” The Boston Daily Globe repeats it on 11 December 1893 (Barry Popik ↗).
  • 14 March 1895 — the exact modern wording appears in an advertisement in the Livingston Herald of Livingston, Montana, set out over three lines: “EVERYTHING / Comes to him who hustles / While he waits.” No author is named — it is a slogan (Barry Popik ↗).
  • 1907–1908 — Francis Arthur Jones publishes Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor’s Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907; New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1908). On page 14 he applies the motto to Edison’s boyhood as “his own modernized version of the old proverb” — the sentence every later quote book is ultimately copying (Internet Archive ↗).
Public domain

The wording is an anonymous American newspaper motto with no identifiable coiner, but every documented printing of it is comfortably pre-1931 and therefore in the public domain in the United States: the Cleveland Leader of 3 December 1893, the Livingston Herald advertisement of 14 March 1895, and Francis Arthur Jones’s biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907; New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1908), whose digitized copy the Internet Archive ↗ lists as NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT. Copyright status is a separate question from attribution: the text is free to reuse, but crediting it to Edison is not supported by the record.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

How a wall motto became an Edison quote

This is a textbook case of a slogan acquiring a celebrity owner. The wording existed first, in newspapers, belonging to nobody in particular; a biographer then used it to characterise Edison, and quote anthologies stripped away the biographer.

Thomas Edison No evidence he coined it

Barry Popik traces the motto through the Kansas City Times (3 March 1889), The Forrest Republican (17 June 1891), the Cleveland Leader (3 December 1893) and the Boston Daily Globe (11 December 1893), and a Livingston Herald advertisement carrying this exact wording (14 March 1895) — concluding that “there is no evidence that Edison coined this saying” (Barry Popik ↗).

Francis Arthur Jones Narration, not a quotation

Jones does not report Edison saying anything. He writes that while the boy’s application to the Grand Trunk Railroad was pending, “even then he believed in his own modernized version of the old proverb” — the motto sits inside Jones’s own sentence, as his characterisation of Edison’s attitude (Internet Archive, 1908 edition ↗).

Edison's own circle Hedged even in his lifetime

The volume of addresses from the October 1928 medal presentation puts it at two removes: “he is said to have made an adaptation of the well-known maxim to the effect that everything comes to him who hustles while he waits” — a well-known maxim he was reported to have adapted, not one he made (transcribed by Barry Popik ↗).

Quote books and quote sites Attribution with no source

By the late twentieth century the hedges are gone. The Harper Book of Quotations (revised edition, 1993, p. 13) and The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Inspirational Quotes (2004, p. 126) both print the line with a flat “Thomas A. Edison” under it and no citation, and today’s quote aggregators copy that (Barry Popik ↗).

The honest version: an anonymous American business motto of the early 1890s, punning on the old proverb “all things come to him who waits,” first credited in print to an unnamed businessman in Erie County, New York, and only later draped over Thomas Edison by a biographer (Barry Popik ↗).

Context

A joke on a proverb, not an inventor's maxim

The line is a pun, and the pun is the whole point. The nineteenth-century proverb was “All things come to him who waits” — a counsel of patience, now usually heard as “good things come to those who wait” (Wiktionary ↗). American business culture in the 1880s and 1890s had no patience for patience, and it rewrote the proverb on itself: first “All things come to him who hustles,” said of Kansas City in 1889 and stuck on a Chicago man’s mock coat-of-arms in 1891, then the fuller gag “All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits,” hanging on an Erie County businessman’s office wall by December 1893.

That is the kind of line that belongs to everybody and nobody — a motto-card slogan, a newspaper filler item, an advertisement. What it lacked was an owner. Francis Arthur Jones supplied one. Writing Edison’s life story, Jones needed a way to explain why a boy kept hawking papers on the street while waiting to hear back about the Grand Trunk concession, and he reached for the catchphrase of his own era, calling it Edison’s “own modernized version of the old proverb.” From a biographer’s flourish on page 14, quote anthologies extracted a sentence with a famous name under it.

American business culture in the 1890s had no patience for patience, so it rewrote the proverb on itself.

Why this one was so easy to pin on Edison

The attribution survives because the fit is good. Edison genuinely was a boy who sold newspapers, candy and vegetables on the trains running Port Huron to Detroit (Wikipedia ↗), and hustle-while-you-wait is a fair one-line summary of the public Edison myth. Nothing about the sentence trips an alarm.

But note the arithmetic the myth requires. Edison was born in 1847, and Jones places the scene when he was “about eleven years old.” The wording itself is not documented in print until 1889 at the earliest, and the exact “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits” form not until 1895. For the attribution to work, a boy would have to have minted a slogan that American newspapers only began printing decades later — and then have left no record of ever saying it.

Edison’s own circle was more careful than the quote books. In the 1929 volume of addresses delivered at the presentation of his Congressional Medal, the line appears with two layers of hedging: “he is said to have made an adaptation of the well-known maxim to the effect that everything comes to him who hustles while he waits” (transcribed by Barry Popik ↗). Even then, it was a well-known maxim he was reported to have adapted — not a maxim he made.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Work Success Hope

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Barry Popik: "Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits"barrypopik.com

The anchor research. Popik's dated citation trail from the 1889 Kansas City Times through the 1893 Cleveland Leader and Boston Daily Globe, the 1895 Livingston Herald advertisement and the Jones biography, with his conclusion that there is no evidence Edison coined the saying.
Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life (1908) — full scanarchive.org

The digitized T. Y. Crowell edition of Francis Arthur Jones's biography. Page 14 carries the sentence in which Jones calls the motto Edison's "own modernized version of the old proverb." Internet Archive lists the item as NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.
Thomas Edison — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line among Edison's quotes with the honest secondary framing "As quoted in Thomas Alva Edison : Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life (1908) by Francis Arthur Jones, p. 14" — i.e. sourced to a biographer, not to Edison.
all things come to those who waiten.wiktionary.org

The proverb the motto is punning on: "A patient person will be satisfied in due time; patience is a virtue," with a usage note that the "all" form is now dated in favour of "good things come to those who wait."
Thomas Edisonen.wikipedia.org

Biography confirming Edison's dates (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) and the newsboy job on the trains from Port Huron to Detroit that Jones was describing on page 14.

The man it was pinned to

Thomas Edison, and the motto he inherited

Thomas Edison

1847–1931 · American inventor & businessman · began as a newsboy on the Port Huron–Detroit trains

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman whose work on electric light, sound recording and motion pictures reshaped everyday life. He really did start out selling newspapers, candy and vegetables on the Grand Trunk trains between Port Huron and Detroit — the very episode Francis Arthur Jones was describing when he hung this motto on the young Edison. That biographical fit is exactly why the line stuck: it sounds like him, which is the most reliable way for a quote to acquire a famous owner it never had.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented

“Passing Events,” Cleveland Leader, December 3, 1893, p. 4, col. 3 (as “All Things Come to Him Who Hustles While He Waits”); this exact wording in an advertisement, Livingston Herald (Livingston, MT), March 14, 1895, p. 2, col. 5. Attached to Edison in Francis Arthur Jones, Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor’s Life (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1908), 14; first published London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907. Citations compiled by Barry Popik.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/everything-comes-to-him-who-hustles-while-he-waits/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied