Edward de Bono Quotes

To understand is to perceive patterns.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'

Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.

If you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful - that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience - every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything's pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

There is nothing like a good dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his wife.

Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.

Appreciating complexity while searching through its thickets to find essential factors leads to understanding.

Football isn't nuclear physics, but it's not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.

I am a simple man, though my wife says I am complicated. I'll trust her on that one.

We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.

My world is not spectacle and explosion. It's two people talking.

I think I'm a little less naive than SpongeBob can sometimes seem to be.

I like cutting through complexity and trying to get to the kernel of an idea.

Facts are often complicated.

There's a lot you can learn about something by taking it apart.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

Men should come with instruction booklets.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.