Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.

Entrepreneurs are natural problem-solvers, which means that we always have ideas for new businesses popping into our heads. Having a lot of options is great, but sometimes it can be hard to focus on one when you are keen to move onto the next.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I’m saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

At home, we must reject the mistaken notion – a notion that has dominated too much of the public dialogue for too long – that ever bigger Government is the answer to every problem.

I like making things. I don’t like getting my picture taken.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

Inside of every problem lies an opportunity.

I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

In most communities it is illegal to cry ‚fire‘ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

I’m a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what’s wrong and fixing it.

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

Such a chimerical idea as telegraphing vocal sounds would indeed, to most minds, seem scarcely feasible enough to spend time in working over. I believe, however, that it is feasible and that I have got the cue to the solution of the problem.

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.

And so I think that the idea of America working with other countries to solve problems is good for us, and it is part of digging us out of the ‚my way or the highway‘ approach that was evident in the previous eight years.

I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Don’t find fault, find a remedy.