Popular quotes about Brains! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 54
He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.
Charles SpurgeonOur visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.
Jonathan FranzenI am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and weโre both unhappy, and we both suffer.
Fyodor DostoevskyI stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris LessingSocieties would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.
David EaglemanSpinning out of my neuromarketing work where, based on scanning the brains of 2,000 respondents' brains using fMRI, we learned that there's a huge correlation between religion and branding - and thus the way that brands intend to generate customer evangelism are to be constructed.
Martin LindstromThere is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.
Jason SilvaBy all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.
Richard DawkinsNations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.
Mark TwainWhen discussing complex systems like brains and other societies, it is easy to oversimplify: I call this Occam's lobotomy.
I. J. GoodIf we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.
Philippa PerryJournalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege. Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and listen and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history.
Oriana FallaciThere must be a marsh in the brains of these men or there would not be so many frogs of wrong ideas gathered in their heads.
Mehmet Murat IldanThe real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North WhiteheadWhat can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? ... wearying himself with climbing upon every ascent, ... bruising himself with continual falls, and at last breaking his neck? And all this, from an imagination that it would be glorious to have the eyes of people looking up at him, and mighty happy to eat, and drink, and sleep, at the top of the highest trees in the kingdom.
William LawIt is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them โ the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
Fyodor DostoevskyWe ought, in humanity, no more to despise a man for the misfortunes of the mind than for those of the body, when they are such as he cannot help; were this thoroughly considered we should no more laugh at a man for having his brains cracked than for having his head broke.
Alexander PopeIf brains have brought us to what we are in now, I think it is time to allow our hearts to speak. When our sons are killed by the millions, let us, mothers, only try to do good by going to the kings and emperors without any other danger than a refusal.
Rosika SchwimmerLet positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.
Swami VivekanandaThe reason the all-American boy prefers beauty over brains is that the all-American boy can see better than he can think.
Farrah FawcettFor centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
Neil deGrasse TysonI made a lot of changes in my life between my twenties and thirties, and it all sort of revolves around how I think people with nerdier brains tend to problem-solve and approach things differently then "norms."
Chris HardwickHappiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
Leo RostenAccepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.
Tim HarfordYour assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won't come in. If you challenge your own, you won't be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others. You'll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.
Alan AldaChess is a good way to learn, to keep your brain fit and the ego in check, a mental form of your local gymnasium. Those who see chess merely as a means of self-proof make the game experience uncomfortable and drive many of the better, more sensitive brains to analysis, correspondence, problems, studies and the like.
Peter AbelardStars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been
Angela CarterWhat else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.
Orson Scott CardI can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.
John EcclesFor a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.
Natsuo KirinoThey take the circuits out of peopleโs brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. Iโm sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You donโt have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.
Haruki MurakamiFor God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
Robert Louis StevensonWhen 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.
Benjamin CarsonBut I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them
Wilkie CollinsFree love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
Emma GoldmanWith so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
Richard DawkinsThe shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.
Neil PostmanGenuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.
Lev GrossmanI'm not a fan of reality shows, but I am a fan of people who use their brains and skills and hard work to outsmart people, not to steal someone's man or get drunk on TV.
Sandra Bullock