Charles Kettering Quotes

You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.

You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.

The only time you mustn't fail is the last time you try.

here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.

If you're doing something the same way you have been doing it for ten years, the chances are you are doing it wrong.

99 percent of success is built on failure.

I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.

One fails forward toward success.

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice.

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.

Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.

It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.

There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.

No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.

The opportunities in this world are as great as we have the imagination to see them... but we never get that view from the bottom of the nest.

If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time.

An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise we would never have anything new.

The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.

We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

The difference between intelligence and an education is this: that intelligence will make a good living for you, but education won't do much for you at all.

We must look forward to the future as that is where most of us will be spending the rest of our lives.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

I could do nothing without my problems; they toughen my mind. In fact, I tell my assistants not to bring me their successes for they weaken me, but rather to bring me their problems, for they strengthen me.

We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

Failures, repeated failures, are sign-posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try something (and it works).

Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.

What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.

If I have had any success, it's due to luck, but I notice the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.

I don't want men of experience working for me. The experienced man is always telling me why something can't be done. The fellow who has not had any experience is so dumb he doesn't know a thing can't be done - and he goes ahead and does it.

A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

You can send a message around the world in one-fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man's head to the inside.

I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future, so I want to be reasonably sure of what kind of future it's going to be. That is my reason for planning.

Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.

We suffer not from overproduction but from undercirculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones.