Edward de Bono

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

It's always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.

Teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters increased employment 500 percent.

My thinking was taught to tribes in South Africa like the Zulus and Xhosas. At the time there were about 210 fights breaking out among them every month, but after they listened to my lessons, this fell to just four.

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.

People should realize we're jerks just like them.

If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

I think school is a place where thinking should be taught.

Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.

What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think.

I think there is a danger with young people of being dependent in the sense that they don't acquire any identity or self-image of themselves as thinkers.

Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.

I must say, I don't feel very qualified to be a pop star. I feel very awkward at times in the role.

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

I do a great deal of work with young children, and if you give a child a problem, he may come up with a highly original solution, because he doesn't have the established route to it.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.