Quotes About Brains

Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we're not aware of that. We feel like there's a circle of light. We're like the drunk who lost his keys and is looking under the streetlight, and the cop says, "Where'd you lose your keys?" You say, "Back in the alley, but the light's so much better over here." The divided self refers to the fact that we are basically animals with animal brains. These animal brains run our lives. They're very good at it.

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

How did the dolphins and whales get such big brains? They obviously don't need such big brains to catch fish.

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.

In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts which He also gave us. A man who has not learned to say, No -who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in spite of every silvery choice that woos him aside-will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.

My life is so boring that your brains are going to melt and come out of your eyes.

My son has few friends and even fewer who know him for what he is. So long as you protect him, you live. Sumerian or not. But if you prove false in anything you’ve said here today, I will bring a wrath down on you so sever that you will spend eternity trying to dig out your own brains to alleviate the pain of it. (Apollymi)

If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.

I've always been fascinated by intelligence and how our brains work, and how they can be improved.

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure--but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary "tools," etc.

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

Obviously it takes eight brains to come to one decision in this crowd. Good thing they have one another.

Is there a place in a church where you leave your brains when you enter?

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

The reason the all-American boy prefers beauty over brains is that the all-American boy can see better than he can think.

Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.

Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.

Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.

I wanted to show them I will never give up. We have to keep together. I still believe in myself. I will never change. The players need to release the rubbish from their brains.

What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband

Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.

Believe me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains.

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day.

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer?

I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.

And stop talking in that puffed-up way they taught you. Words aren't brains, you know.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.

If I should come out of this war alive, I will have more luck than brains.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

Gentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

You don't have to just hit nails with hammers, you know; you can use a hammer to beat somebody's brains in, to make armor or break a car window. You can do all kinds of things with your instrument outside of its surface purpose. My bass is my crutch but the best crutch I could have.

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.

No longer can we afford to stuff the brains of the young with facts. The time is too short, the necessity for results too pressing. The new education must be based on the elimination of facts except as they illustrate principles. How to use facts, not how to accumulate them, is the purpose of true education.

I think that human beings have gotten as far as we've gotten because of our adaptability, our ability to adapt, and our ability to dovetail our technologies - our brains to our tools. With the Industrial Revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the digital revolution, we transcend the limits of our minds.

Look not to a woman's head for her brains, but rather to her heart.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

I flashed her a smile, but she didn't even look at me. So for brains and good judgment, I'd give her a three.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.