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Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don't expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you..." ... "What is it?" [Holly] asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible. "Yeah," agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. "Why am I an imbecile?
Sep 20, 2025
Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.
Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process.
How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.
Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
The sorcery and charm of imagination, and the power it gives to the individual to transform his world into a new world of order and delight, makes it one of the most treasured of all human capacities.
God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.
A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.
We are apt to think that our ideas are the creation of our own wisdom but the truth is that they are the result of the experience through outside contact.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
Microsoft is a company that manages imagination.
Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.
Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. It is now fast becoming the one factor in production, sidelining both capital and labour.
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
The map is not the territory.
Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.
To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge to overcome makes us stronger, rather than unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage.
To ask the hard question is simple.
The obvious is always least understood.
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
A person who can create ideas worthy of note is a person who has learned much from others.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
Change only favours minds that are diligently looking and preparing for discovery.
Ideas shape the course of history.
It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
Imagination is the beginning of creation.
We would like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves that we are good in order to survive.
The art of creation is older than the art of killing.
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all.
Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions - if they only had taken the first step and then followed through.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Perfect solutions of our difficulties are not to be looked for in an imperfect world.