Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Charles F. Kettering (American Inventor)

Charles Franklin Kettering (1876–1958) was an American automobile engineer. He was one of the leading inventors of his time.

Born in an Ohio farmhouse, Kettering founded Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO,) which was sold to the General Motors Corporation (GM) in 1916. He became the head of research and later the vice president of GM.

During a long career as an inventor, Kettering was responsible for the development of the synchromesh gearbox, automatic transmission, power steering, electric self-starter, four-wheel brakes, and quick-drying paint for automobiles, among other devices. He also discovered the use of tetraethyl lead for an antiknock agent in petrol fuel.

Together with Alfred Sloan, Kettering founded the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (1945.) He also established the Flint Institute of Technology (1919) and General Motors Institute (1926,) now named Kettering University.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Charles F. Kettering

There has never been any 30-hour week for men who had anything to do.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Work

When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I’d place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: LEAVE SLIDE RULES HERE! If I didn’t do that, I’d find some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he’d be on his feet saying, “Boss you can’t do that.”
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Perception

My interest is in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Tomorrow, Vision, The Future, Future

If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Business, Advertising

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

A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Common Sense, Men

The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required blood and sweat and tears.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Faith, Future

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Understanding

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Change, Ideals

Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking

An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Creativity, Failure

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Ideas

Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Business

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Imagination

If you have always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Now, Heart, Rightness, Change, Right, Instincts, Secret

Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don’t want to fail is the last time you try something … One fails forward toward success.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Mistakes, Success & Failure, Achievement, Failures

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don’t work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don’t, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Progress

In America we can say what we think, and even if we can’t think, we can say it anyhow.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking, Thought

Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
Charles F. Kettering

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.
Charles F. Kettering

You can be sincere and still be stupid.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Ignorance

Don’t be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don’t follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it’s enough.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Ideas

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Hope, Imagination

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.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Action, Failure, Chance

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Failure, Act, Fail, Belief, Believe

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.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Challenges, Trying, Success & Failure, Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve, Action

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Identifying Problems, Problems

No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Adversity, Risk

People are very open-minded about new things—as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Open-mindedness, Tolerance, Change

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.
Charles F. Kettering
Topics: Mistake, War, Fail, Failure, Great, Failures, Learn, Mistakes, Success

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