Charles Kettering Quotes

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.

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.

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

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

99 percent of success is built on failure.

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.

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

It is the ‘follow through’ that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.

Education is man’s going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.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.

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.

This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.

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

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

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

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.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.