Charles Kettering Quotes - Page 2

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

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.

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

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.

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

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

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

I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.

The price of progress is trouble.

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.

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

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.

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

The person who doesn't know something can't be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good.

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

One fails forward toward success.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.

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

People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.

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.

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.

We suffer not from overproduction but from undercirculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones.

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.