Top 90 Charles F. Kettering Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.”

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Goal Quotes, Confidence Quotes, Motivational Work Quotes, Personal Development Quotes

2. “A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Short Quotes, Short Positive Quotes, Problem-Solving Quotes, Clever Quotes

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

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Excellence Quotes, Expectations Quotes, Teacher Quotes

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

9. “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

10. “There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.”

— Charles F. Kettering

11. “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 F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: New Year Quotes

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

— Charles F. Kettering

15. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

18. “The price of progress is trouble.”

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Progress Quotes

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

— Charles F. Kettering

20. “A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man’s head.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

22. “99 percent of success is built on failure.”

— Charles F. Kettering

23. “One fails forward toward success.”

— Charles F. Kettering

24. “Every honest researcher I know admits he’s just a professional amateur. He’s doing whatever he’s doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he’s going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.”

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Charles F. Kettering

26. “Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

28. “The only time you mustn’t fail is the last time you try.”

— Charles F. Kettering

29. “Learn how to fail intelligently.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering

32. “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

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

— Charles F. Kettering

34. “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

35. “Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.”

— Charles F. Kettering

36. “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 F. Kettering

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

39. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

40. “It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.”

— Charles F. Kettering

Featured in: Tattoo Quotes

41. “Do not bring me your successes; they weaken me. Bring me your problems; they strengthen me.”

— Charles F. Kettering

42. “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.”

— Charles F. Kettering

43. “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

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

— Charles F. Kettering

45. “We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.”

— Charles F. Kettering

46. “It is man’s destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a byproduct of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.”

— Charles F. Kettering

47. “The difference between intelligence and an education is this-that intelligence will make you a good living.”

— Charles F. Kettering

48. “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...”

— Charles F. Kettering

49. “In many ways ideas are more important than people – they are much more permanent.”

— Charles F. Kettering

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

— Charles F. Kettering