A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.