Success Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Failure gets rehabilitated here, but only on Kettering's terms. The line looks like a motivational poster until you notice the pivot: the first half waves off repeated failure as noise; the second half turns “failure” into a moral category only when it hardens into refusal. He’s not praising grit as an abstract virtue. He’s drawing a boundary between productive loss (data) and sterile loss (ego-protection).

As an inventor who helped industrialize American life - from automotive ignition to the R&D model inside big corporations - Kettering understood that modern progress runs on controlled disappointment. In a lab, “try and fail” isn’t a personal verdict; it’s a way to map reality. The cadence (“try and try and try again”) mimics iteration, the grind of test benches and prototypes. Then he snaps the rhythm with the real condemnation: “fail to try again.” That phrase shifts agency back onto the person. The only unforgivable outcome isn’t the bad result; it’s opting out of the process that produces better results.

The subtext is quietly anti-romantic. Talent doesn’t save you, and neither does optimism. What matters is sustaining the loop: attempt, feedback, revision. Read in its early-20th-century context - a culture enamored with invention, efficiency, and the promise of engineered solutions - the quote doubles as an ethic for industrial modernity. It gives permission to be wrong repeatedly, as long as you keep showing up to be corrected.