100 Henry Ford Quotes on Success, Life & Business [2024]

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Updated: January 20th, 2022

Henry Ford was an American industrialist and business magnate best known for founding the Ford Motor Company and promoting the development of the assembly line technique of mass production, making the Ford Model T, one of America’s greatest inventions.

Mr. Henry Ford was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1996 and has also won many awards and recognition for his incredible work.

We've put together an incredible collection of Henry Ford quotes to read.

Here they are:

100 Henry Ford Quotes on Success, Life & Business [2024]

List of Inspiring Henry Ford Quotes

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young."

"Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again."

"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."

"My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me."

"Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain"

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals."

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

"Vision without execution is just hallucination."

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black"

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it."

"When everything seem to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it ...."

"It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste"

"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking."

"Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."

"Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice"

"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs"

"If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability."

"One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do."

"Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them."

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

"You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is, it's how we use it that makes things possible."

"The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it."

"You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year."

"If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got."

"There is no man living who isn't capable of doing more than he thinks he can do."

"Success is 99% failure"

"If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own."

"I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago."

"A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business."

"There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy."

"Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necesary to a worthwhile achievement."

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits."

"If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself."

"There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something."

"The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already."

"Money doesn't make us anyway it just unmasks us."

"A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large."

"You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader."

"To do more for the world than the world does for you - that is success."

"Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work."

"An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous."

"There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail."

"I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible."

"We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage."

"There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible."

"Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do."

"Money is like an arm or leg- use it or lose it."

"As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow"

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages."

"To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form."

"I am looking for a lot of men who have and infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done."

"New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is."

"Sometimes you just don't like somebody"

"That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness."

"Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth."

"Experience is the thing of supreme value"

"Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success."

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today."

"It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he?"

"To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense"

"The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt."

"Don't find fault. Find a remedy."

"The natural thing to do is to work—to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort."

"As we serve our jobs we serve the world."

"That the earth produces, or is capable of producing, enough to give decent sustenance to everyone—not of food alone, but of everything else we need. For everything is produced from the earth."

"Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live."

"Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about."

"Speculation into thing already produced that is not business"

"It ought to be the employer’s ambition as leader to pay than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make it possible"

"That man is best educated who knows the greatest number of things that are so, and who can do the greatest number of things to help and heal the world."

"Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount"

"Any man can learn anything he will, but no man can teach except to those who want to learn."

"The short successes that can be gained in a brief time and without difficulty, are not worth much."

"Nothing can be made except by makers, nothing can be managed except by managers. Money cannot make anything and money cannot manage anything."

"We are entering an era when we shall create resources which shall be so constantly renewed that the only loss will be not to use them. There will be such a plenteous supply of heat, light and power, that it will be a sin not to use all we want. This era is coming now. And it is coming by way of Water."

"Two classes of people lose money; those who are too weak to guard what they have; those who win money by trick. They both lose in the end"

"When people are 'stung' in false investment schemes there are three causes; greed of something for nothing; sheer inability to know their mind; or infantile trustfulness"

"What right have you, save service to the world, to think that other men's labor should contribute to your gains"

"The remains of the old must be decently laid away; the path of the new prepared. That is the difference between Revolution and Progress."

"Most people think that faith means believing something; oftener it means trying something, giving it a chance to prove itself"

"It is regrettable that people think about our monetary system, and of our economic structure, only in times of depression."

"The only prosperity the people can afford to be satisfied with is the kind that lasts"

"The gifted man bears his gifts into the world, not for his own benefit, but for the people among whom he is placed; for the gifts are not his, he himself is a gift to the community."

"People are never so likely to be wrong as when they are organized. And they never have so little freedom. Perhaps that is why the people at large keep their freedom. People can be manipulated only when they are organized."

"The most closely organized groups and movements in the world are those which have been the least friendly to the people's progress and liberty"

"With all the wealth of the world at hand, there are human beings who hunger, whole nations who suffer cold. The judgment for this condition, for misusing Nature's gifts, is the judgment upon man's failure, man's unsteadiness. Leadership is the thing."

"Profits made out of the distress of the people are always much smaller than profits made out of the most lavish service of the people at the lowest prices that competent management can make possible."

"Our modern industrialism, changed to motives of public service, will provide means to remove every injustice that gives soil for prejudice."

"Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing."

"Politics in the true sense, have to do with the prosperity, peace and security of the people."

"If a young man wants to fit himself for the Politics of tomorrow, let him fit himself into essential industry for the purpose of learning how best to conduct it for the whole public good."

"Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it."

"We are here for experience, and experience is a preparation to know the Truth when we meet it"

"Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far."

"The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time."

"Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die."

"There is no failure except failure to serve one's purpose."

"Thinking calls for facts; facts are found by digging; but he who has gathered this wealth is well equipped for life."

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Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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