Henry Ford

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

Employers only handle the money – it is the customer who pays the wages.

Children have helped me a lot.

I can visualize the time when almost every family will have a small plane in their back yard.

No one loses anything by raising wages as soon as he is able. It has always paid us. Low wages are the most costly any employer can pay. It is like using low-grade material–the waste makes it very expensive in the end. There is no economy in cheap labor or cheap material. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to reduce wages. I think we were the last big company to come to it. Now I am mighty glad that wages are climbing again.

When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows, and all the rest of daily life, was bunk. And I think so yet.

When I am old, weather-worn, and grey, I want to fill my lungs with your perfume and hear your laughter echo through our home as we dance alone in our living room, drunk off wine, still madly in love.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

The menu is not the meal.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

Much depends on people knowing what opportunity means; it doesn’t mean a silver platter, it oftener means a spade. Self-help means something sterner than ‘help yourself’–reach over and take it.

History is more or less bunk.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Hard knocks have a place and value, but hard thinking goes farther in less time.

Enduring habits I hate…. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.