Edward de Bono Quotes

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content.

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.

The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.

The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

The secret to Hitler's power is ... that his unconscious has exceptional access to his conscious and ... that he allows himself to be moved by it. [Others] have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it [but] Hitler listens.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

I can guarantee you nothing I do is a conscious attempt to inject something in.

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

The truths of the Bible are never just abstract concepts; they're always related to real people.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.

Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.

Getting too much money too soon can be really bad. There's a balance to be kept - the right balance between new experience and a certain stability in one's life. I'm conscious of all these things in a way that, earlier on, I was only conscious of circumstantial stuff, like, money.