Edward de Bono Quotes

Asking the right questions is as important as answering them

Focusing on the right question is very different from having the right answers.

The second most important attribute of winners, after understanding the human dimension, is knowing what questions to ask, the rhetorical nature.

Most people believe that great leaders are distinguished by their ability to give compelling answers. This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions…. Berger poses many fascinating questions, including this one: What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? This is a book everyone ought to read—without question.

One of the best skills of an entrepreneur is the ability to question. By asking new questions, new answers are found.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

To think is not enough, you must think of something.

a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

If you don't ask the right question, every answer seems wrong -

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.

How do we attack important problems? Pose the right question.

Asking is the first step in the Creative Process, so make it a habit to ask.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

It's not enough to have the right answers. You have to have the right questions.

The best way to get a better answer is to start asking a better question.

I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.

The questions are always more important than the answers.

The thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you may have.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think.