Quote

One fails forward toward success.

Charles Kettering

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Kettering
Age: 82 †
Born: 1876
Born: August 29
Died: 1958
Died: November 25
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Derby
Vermont
Charles Franklin Kettering
Success
Business
Inspirational
Fails
Forward
Toward
Failure
Failing

More quotes by Charles Kettering

Image
Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
Charles Kettering
Image
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.
Charles Kettering
Image
If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.
Charles Kettering
Image
No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
Charles Kettering
Image
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 Kettering
Image
We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.
Charles Kettering
Image
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.
Charles Kettering
Image
The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.
Charles Kettering
Image
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.
Charles Kettering
Image
here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.
Charles Kettering
Image
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 Kettering
Image
The price of progress is trouble.
Charles Kettering
Image
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 Kettering
Image
We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things there is no downcurve in science.
Charles Kettering
Image
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.
Charles Kettering
Image
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 Kettering
Image
Do not bring me your successes they weaken me. Bring me your problems they strengthen me.
Charles Kettering
Image
What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.
Charles Kettering
Image
We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.
Charles Kettering
Image
Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
Charles Kettering