Brain Quotes
1. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
2. I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
3. This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
4. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.
5. When you’re socially awkward, you’re isolated more than usual, and when you’re isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.
6. Learn to deal with the fact that you are not a perfect person but you are a person that deserves respect and honesty.
7. How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.
8. When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
9. There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
10. No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think.
11. My brain tells me it will be better to just let him go.
My heart… not so much.
12. But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.
13. I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
14. I’m convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease.
15. Isn’t that what it means to be a scientist? To push the boundaries of the unknown? To bravely, actively explore the enormity of our universe ?
16. If I could put my brain in her body, the world would be mine for the taking.
17. I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.
18. I’m an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.
19. She has man’s brain–a brain that a man should have were he much gifted–and woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me when He made that so good combination.
20. Be patient with him. If the same quality did not exist in you, you wouldn’t notice it in him.
21. Whenever I think of something but can’t think of what it was I was thinking of, I can’t stop thinking until I think I’m thinking of it again. I think I think too much.
22. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.
23. Life is funny that way. Sometimes the dumbest thing you do turns out to be the smartest.
24. I don’t believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.
25. Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns…It is a weapon…and like any weapon, you need practice to be any good at wielding it.
26. Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.
27. The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal – the introvert constantly feels too much ‘outerness’ while the extrovert doesn’t feel enough ‘outerness’.
28. There comes a time in a man’s life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.
29. Right? I don’t know why I did it. Temporary insanity, maybe. Did you ever do something that makes absolutely no sense, but you couldn’t help yourself?
30. A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
31. Anger’s like a battery that leaks acid right out of me And it starts from the heart ’til it reaches my outer me
32. The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.
33. Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a “right” to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals’ pain in our hearts.
34. Oftentimes, those special brains, the ones that are capable of focusing more intently than others, do so at the expense of emotional maturity
35. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
36. When the river of emotions bursts its banks and expectations go over the edges of reality, the brain creates hallucinations. Ringxiety-stricken people feel illusive vibrating alerts and hear phantom phone rings, since absence of ringing generates scaring emptiness and destroys their self-esteem.
37. What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
38. God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.
39. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
40. A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.
41. A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
42. If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.
43. The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.
44. Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man.
45. What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.
46. You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
47. [T]he more clamour we make about ‘the women’s point of view’, the more we rub it into people that the women’s point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is — at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the ‘point of view’ of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.
48. This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.
49. My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.
50. The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.
51. A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn’t conceive what it had never experienced
52. You can only trust your emotions as you can lie to yourself with your brain but not your heart.
53. God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.
54. Thoughts do more. Words to much. Actions do much more.
55. When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way.
56. To seek truth requires one to ask the right questions. Those void of truth never ask about anything because their ego and arrogance prevent them from doing so. Therefore, they will always remain ignorant. Those on the right path to Truth are extremely heart-driven and childlike in their quest, always asking questions, always wanting to understand and know everything — and are not afraid to admit they don’t know something. However, every truth seeker does need to breakdown their ego first to see Truth. If the mind is in the way, the heart won’t see anything.
57. To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you.
58. Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud’s ego, id, and superego.)
59. We humans are different – our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.
60. Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.
