Lateral Quotes

#1. Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep.

J.G. Ballard

#2. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

Henry David Thoreau

#3. I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

Michael Helm

#4. Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

Henry James

#5. I see less and less ... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up ... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.

Claude Monet

#6. 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?

Eoin Colfer

#7. I have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It has crippled my body and speech, but not my mind.

Jason Becker

#8. I read once about the concepts of a lateral idea and the vertical idea. If you dig a hole and it's in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn't going to help. The lateral idea is when you skip over and dig someplace else.

Seymour Chwast

#9. The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.

Knut Hamsun

#10. Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#11. This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#12. Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?

Rick Bass

#13. Men tend to be hierarchical, but women are driven to make lateral connections so they can cooperate.

Helen Fisher

#14. The other thing about FEMA, my understanding is that it was supposed to move into the Department of Homeland Security ... and be what it was, but also having a lot of lateral communication with all those others involved in that issue of homeland security.

Warren Rudman

#15. Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

Edward De Bono

#16. Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy.

Andy Hargreaves

#17. 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.

Salman Rushdie

#18. I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

Paul Wolfowitz

#19. 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.

Edward De Bono

#20. I am told by others that I have a lateral-thinking, broad approach to problems, sometimes to my detriment. In school, my grades always suffered because I was continually mucking about with irrelevant side issues, which I often found to be more interesting.

Barry Marshall

#21. the need to be right at every step is absolutely essential to logical thinking, but quite unnecessary in lateral thinking. It

Franz Badenhorst

#22. I would love to slip into the skin of a fish and know what it's like to be one. They have senses that I can only dream about. They have a lateral line down their whole body that senses motion, but maybe it does more than that.

Sylvia Earle

#23. A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.

Jonathan Franzen

#24. For the life of me I can't understand why BP couldn't go in at the ocean floor, maybe 10 feet lateral to the - around the periphery, drill a few holes, and put a little ammonium nitrate, some dynamite in those holes, and detonate that dynamite, and seal that leak. Seal it permanently.

Phil Gingrey

#25. By the time you get to your sixth record, some of the benefits of being in a band are grander than ever, but some of the obstacles are just massive. You deal with these lateral subjects, and all that is left is the elephant in the room.

Josh Homme

#26. To promote "learning-by-being," we can encourage people to engage in unstructured and free-spirited approaches, promoting lateral thinking rather than vertical problem solving.

Matt Ratto

#27. 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'.

Edward De Bono

#28. Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

Adam Rapp

#29. I'm terrible at solving things. I'm really bad and haven't got any sort of lateral thinking capacity. I am your perfect audience for a mystery. I love that kind of stuff. I'm always on the edge of my seat.

Julia Sawalha

#30. The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#31. ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but she has replaced that with her own version-Always live strong

Durjoy Datta

#32. His progress was more lateral than forward.

John Scalzi

#33. Sooner or later, there's always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can't clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.

Steven Kotler

#34. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

Gilles Deleuze