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.
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.
Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways.
Thinking is the ultimate human resource. Yet we can never be satisfied with our most important skill. No matter how good we become, we should always want to be better.
Happiness is for those who don’t really need it. So I can live without happiness.
It’s always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.
The awful thing is that you can never be aware of what you are not aware of.
The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.
Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.
We need both information and thinking. Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.
To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.
This new meta-system is very much in favor of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self.
Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.
Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.
You hold onto religion, you know, rules, regulations, traditions. I think what God is interested in is people’s hearts, and that’s hard enough.
I’m a very loyal and unreliable friend.
Do we have the will to make poverty history?
Everywhere I go, I see very much the same thing. I see the same compassion for people who live half a world away. I see the same concern about events beyond these borders. And, increasingly, I see the same conviction that we can and we must join together to stop the scourge of AIDS and poverty.