Walter Isaacson Quotes

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

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.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

We can't get any new thinking because we can't get any new thinkers.

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

I can see there's a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.

I like to say it's an attitude of not just thinking outside the box, but not even seeing the box.

I think if you're really good at what you do, you can see outside the box.

I know how to think outside of the box and be creative.

You know, when you look carefully at stuff that you deal with everyday, applying a little creativity to it and thinking outside the box, it's amazing what you can do.

The critical mind is the creative mind.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

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

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.

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.