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

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

The vertical thinker says: ‘I know what I am looking for.’ The lateral thinker says: ‘I am looking but I won’t know what I am looking for until I have found it.’

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

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.

Once a new idea springs into existence, it cannot be unthought. There is a sense of immortality in a new idea.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.

We still seek to solve conflicts with ‘judgement’ instead of designing the way forwards.

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

The purpose of art is to reflect new emerging values and to define the new heroes and heroines so that people can absorb them into their perceptions.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.

A good listener is very nearly as attractive as a good talker. You cannot have a beautiful mind if you do not know how to listen.

Do we have the will to make poverty history?

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.

My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that’s my perception of life.

A work of art doesn’t exist outside the perception of the audience.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Perception is a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception.