Edward de Bono Quotes

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

We're always looking for candidates that have new approaches to problems.

Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It's all just a use of your thinking.

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

I wouldn't know how to think inside the box because I don't even know where it is. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realise it's not a box to begin with.

The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.

I give people ideas on how to solve intractable problems.

Big ideas come from forward thinking people who challenge the norm, think outside the box, and invent the world they see inside rather than submitting to the limitations of current dilemmas

The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.

For uncommon solutions, you have to look in uncommon places.

We do not make very full value of the opportunities provided by technology because we prefer critical to constructive thinking, argument to design.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

I've always challenged myself and the people who work with me to take new approaches to traditional business challenges, to push the envelope and constantly ask whether our sacred cows are still producing great milk.

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

Solutions are not the answer.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.