Bon mots: problem-solving

"If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake."
--F. Wilczek

"Never work on a problem for which you do not have an unfair advantage."
(also)
"I don't see why you are talking about this problem when either of you is capable of sitting down and solving it."
--Hans Bethe

"The real problem is what to do with the problem solvers after the problems have been solved."
--Gay Talese

"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
--Ashleigh Brilliant

"Your problem is never really your problem, your reaction to your problem is your problem."
--Brian Kinsey

"I don't understand complicated problems. I only understand simple ones."
--Richard Deupree

"For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong."
--Henry Louis Mencken

"If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has ben mastered."
--Stanley Kubrick

"The chief source of problems is solutions."
--Eric Sevareid (broadacst on CBS News, 12/29/70), as quoted in T. L. Martin, Malice in Blunderland (McGraw-Hill, 1973)

"When you suddenly see the problem, something happens--you have the answer before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. THis has happened too many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I'm so absolutely sure. I don't talk about it, I don't have to tell anybody about it, I'm just sure this is it."
--Barbara McClintock

"Indecision may or may not be my problem."
--Jimmy Buffett

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
--Abraham Maslow

"If the only tool you have for measuring value is a quarterly financial report or a price tag, then everything that is excluded from that report or that comes without a price tag begins to look like it has no value."
--Al Gore

"When there is no solution, there is no problem."
--James Burnham

"Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems you don't get any seeds."
--Norman Vincent Peale

"Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out."
--C. A. R. Hoare (Hoare's Law of Large Programs)

"Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."
--John Galsworthy