Lateral Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

I have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It has crippled my body and speech, but not my mind. — Jason Becker

They found that some emotionally involved brain structures were highly activated by the choice of immediate or near-term rewards. These areas were associated with impulsive behavior, including drug addiction. In contrast, when participants opted for longer-term rewards with higher return, lateral areas of the cortex involved in higher cognition and deliberation were more active.18 And the higher the activity in these lateral areas, the more the participant was willing to defer gratification. — David Eagleman

Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy. — Andy Hargreaves

As a king, I have specified 2 urns as my backdrop, I have drank a cold Islamic green from my goblet, I have surveyed the Moorish lanterns of Iberia, so that when I come to a stance, when I come to a wisely chosen acre of granite, I am on grounds of a new undistinguished bodily grain, a prophet increased by fore-shortened spells, by Persian miniature gladioli, roosting upon the blood of erupting lateral wheat. — Will Alexander

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

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

The feel of a good row stays with you hours afterward. Your muscles glow, your mind wanders from the papers on you desk and goes back, again and again, to that terrific power piece at the end of the workout when it felt as if you and the boat were flying, as if you legs were two cannons and your arms were two oars and the great lateral muscles of your back were pterodactyl wings and the brim of your baseball cap was a harpoon. — Barry S. Strauss

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

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

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

The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Staying relaxed was helping him cope with the drug induced juddering vision that could be best described as being like a Hitchcockian visual effect operated by a hyperactive squirrel that shook the whole universe closer and farther away. If you went with it, it was quite pleasant, as long as you didn't introduce any lateral movement like turning your head or the car. This caused the universe to try and slide away from underneath you. The other side effect was the constant feeling you ought to try to twist your head off, in a good way. — Dylan Perry

Other than his ex-wife and despite appearances with a series of cultivated blondes, Edward de Bono has never publicly aligned himself with a woman. 'I'm looking for a fat, cross-eyed hunchback,' he explains, stifling a giggle. 'A prosthetic hump would do.' His delight evaporates when asked about his three grandchildren. 'Am I a doting grandfather?' He pauses. 'I'm a ... something grandfather, yes.' The fact that De Bono remains unperturbed by this lack betrays an emotionally austere childhood, and his passions for play, toys, and bad jokes tell of the same deprivation. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

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

Thinking can be lateral or "sweaty". For the latter you're better off in an office and following a routine but for the former you have to be "out of your mind", so to speak. So although I recognize the merits of hard work, I find that my work goes stale if I don't go off wandering around the world every few weeks. My friends think I'm a gipsy, but that's when I do "part 1" of my best work. — Joao Magueijo

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

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

Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which ... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of ... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process. — Edward De Bono

W turned on his heel and began walking toward the door at the far wall. And by walking I mean, of course, not moving at all, at least not to the naked eye, because his strides could only be measured in micrometers. His creaky legs made barely the tiniest of forward steps, so he'd taken four strides before I noticed any lateral movement at all.
"I'll be right back."
"Geologically speaking, of course," HARV said. — John Zakour

In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane.*
*This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people. — Terry Pratchett

Choices

If i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do

It's not the same thing
but it's the best i can
do

If i can't have
what i want . . . then
my job is to want
what i've got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more to want

Since i can't go
where i need
to go . . . then i must . . . go
where the signs point
through always understanding
parallel movement
isn't lateral

When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal

I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry — Nikki Giovanni

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

The tag that I was too small and too slow just made me work that much harder. Besides, quickness is more important than flat-out speed. How often does a receiver run 40 yards straight down the field? Not very often. Lateral speed is what counts. How quickly can you get in and out of a cut? I can do that as well as anyone. — Steve Largent

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

With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them. — Edward De Bono

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

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

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world. — Jeremy Rifkin

When people consider the trolley problem, here's what brain imaging reveals: In the footbridge scenario, areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. In contrast, in the track-switch scenario, only lateral areas involved in rational thinking become active. People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek's Mr. Spock. — David Eagleman

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

Men tend to be hierarchical, but women are driven to make lateral connections so they can cooperate. — Helen Fisher

Where was I? What had been done? I replied that I was in the recovery room and that he had detached the lateral rectus muscle of the right eye and attached the plaque containing radioiodine (I-125, to be precise) to the sclera. I said that I was sorry it was not radioactive ruthenium instead of iodine (I have a thing for the platinum metals) but that 125, at least, was memorable for being the smallest number that was the sum of two squares in two different ways. I startled myself as I said this; I had not thought it out before - it just jumped into my mind. (I realized, a few minutes later, that I was wrong - 65 is the smallest such number.) — Oliver Sacks

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

I had always made pictures as I thought I saw the world, focusing on what lay in front, but this is not how one sees the world. It only frames the centre and cuts off the lateral vision, which lies unfocused. Now I found that I could turn my eye to the adjacent field of vision, seeing another focus, an extension which I added to the original. Instead of stopping at two focuses, I looked further to the side, adding another and yet another ... — Joseph Plaskett

The parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more "calculating" part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year's resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused. — Abhijit V. Banerjee

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

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

At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone he knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him. — Mario Puzo

I have been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It's a terminal disease with an average lifespan of two to five years post-diagnosis, and scientists don't know what causes it. ALS prevents your brain from talking to your muscles. As a result, muscles die. As a result, every 90 minutes people die. I am a person. — Steve Gleason

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

The digestive canal is in its task a complete chemical factory. The raw material passes through a long series of institutions in which it is subjected to certain mechanical and, mainly, chemical processing, and then, through innumerable side-streets, it is brought into the depot of the body. Aside from this basic series of institutions, along which the raw material moves, there is a series of lateral chemical manufactories, which prepare certain reagents for the appropriate processing of the raw material. — Ivan Pavlov

Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one? — Rick Bass

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based. — Elizabeth Janeway

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

Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour. — Edward De Bono

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

His progress was more lateral than forward. — John Scalzi

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

ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but she has replaced that with her own version-Always live strong — Durjoy Datta

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

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

No institutional arrangement will ever contain all that they church is. Don't look for it institutionally; look for it relationally. Certainly the New Testament talks about the priorities of that church
Jesus as its sole head and focus, daily encouragement among believers, plural and lateral leadership, open participation, and an environment of freedom so people can grow in him. — Wayne Jacobsen And Dave Coleman