Browsing Topic Best Lateral Thinking Quotes

The only joy in the world is to begin.

To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.

Being able to ‘think out of the box’ presupposes you were able to think in it.

It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Microsoft is a company that manages imagination.

Don’t confuse being stimulating with being blunt.

Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

The map is not the territory.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.

Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.

Lateral thinking… is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

We would like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves that we are good in order to survive.

Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which… leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of… the term ‘lateral thinking’ has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; ‘vertical thinking’ is used to denote the conventional logical process.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all.

Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

The sorcery and charm of imagination, and the power it gives to the individual to transform his world into a new world of order and delight, makes it one of the most treasured of all human capacities.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage ‘lateral thinking,’ new ways of seeing and putting data together – but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye … The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.

God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.

Ideas shape the course of history.

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The obvious is always least understood.