Charles Kettering quotes

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. (Charles Kettering)
There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
Charles Kettering
Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.
Charles Kettering
High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.
Charles Kettering
Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
Charles Kettering
An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
Charles Kettering
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
Charles Kettering
Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
Charles Kettering
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
Charles Kettering
You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
Charles Kettering
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress. (Charles Kettering)
Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
Charles Kettering
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.
Charles Kettering
The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.
Charles Kettering
Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
Charles Kettering
No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
Charles Kettering
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 Kettering
One fails forward toward success.
Charles Kettering
You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.
Charles Kettering
A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
Charles Kettering
An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots. (Charles Kettering)
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 Kettering
The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.
Charles Kettering
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.
Charles Kettering
If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.
Charles Kettering