Walter Isaacson Quotes

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

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

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

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

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

The essence of scientific genius is to question what the rest of us take for granted.

There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.

Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.

I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think.

Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did.

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.

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

Like another great mind of his time, Albert Einstein, Keynes had a preternatural ability to see relationships between complex phenomena entirely differently than generations of experts before him.

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.

It's important to be unconventional.

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

Sometimes a crazy idea can make something special.

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

Rarely, someone comes around that is influenced by so many things but is looking for a new way to do something.

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.

If everybody thinks you're out of your mind, you just might be onto something.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box