Henry Ford

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.

Experience is the harvest of life, and every harvest is the result of a sowing. The experience which young people must crave is that of success in some service for which they are naturally fitted.

Many people seem to believe that Greenfield Village and the Edison Institute and Museum at Dearborn, with their specimens of earlier type of American life and industry, are just a kind of antiquarian hobby of mine. I do not deny that they have given me a great deal of interest and pleasure. But the project is vastly more than a hobby. It has very definite purposes, and I hope will have results lasting down the years. One purpose is to remind the public who visit it and sometimes there are thousands a day–of how farand how fast we have come in technical progress in the last century or so. If we have come so far and so fast, is it likely that we shall stop now?

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.

The best way is always the simplest. The attics of the world are cluttered up with complicated failures.

The unhappiest man on earth is the one who has nothing to do.

Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.

All beings are by nature Buddha, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddha.

If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments.

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

I’m the fifth generation of Seventh Day Adventists and the youngest of four brothers. When I was still very small, we formed a gospel quartet.

What was never lost can never be found.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

If something is easy for you, work on it a little. If it’s hard for you, work on it a lot.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.