Selected problem solving quotes

1. I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

2. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

3. The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

4. I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.

5. Most of my problems have no answer or else the answer is worse than the problem.

6. My computer must be broken: whenever I ask a wrong question, it gives a wrong answer.

7. You can never discard too many bad ideas.

8. My problems aren't big but it doesn't necessarily take a big problem to kill me.

9. By using your intelligence, you can sometimes make your problems twice as complicated.

10. Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

11. Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

12. An idea is salvation by imagination.

13. Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

14. A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.

15. Don't find fault, find a remedy.

16. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

17. Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

18. If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.

19. An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

20. Never cut what you can untie.

21. Veronica solves little puzzles because she, like all of us, cannot unravel the bigger ones.

22. Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

23. In other words, the real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform, from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions.

24. There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing.

25. And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...

26. If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

27. It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.

28. We venture to make the assertion that there is but one sin: IGNORANCE, and but one salvation: APPLIED KNOWLEDGE.

29. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

30. I don't think most people associate me with leeches or how to get them off. But I know how to get them off. I'm an expert at it.

31. You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it's aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don't care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don't care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.

32. As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong.

33. If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.

34. I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.

35. There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

36. No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

37. Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

38. Don't argue about the difficulties. The difficulties will argue for themselves.

39. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

40. A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

41. It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

42. The best way out is always through.

43. The solutions all are simple... after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

44. There is but one special interest that we should be working for, and that would solve just about all of our problems, and that is our liberty.

45. A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.

46. The way that helps will not be the same; it changes according to the situation.

47. It's the Simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.

48. To the yoke of necessity every one willingly bows the head. Still, wherever an actually complicated aspect of things presents itself, it is more difficult to discover exactly what is necessary; but by the very acknowledgment of the principle, the problem invariably becomes simpler and the solution easier.

49. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

50. Mozart touched no problem without solving it to perfection. ~ Donald Francis Tovey