Brain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.

Pooh began to feel a little more comfortable, because when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

The machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.

The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement... I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay

Charles Dickens

Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.

Michel de Montaigne

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

Install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

As we trace the development of man over the ages, it seems in many respects a tale of glory and victory; of the development of the brain; of the discovery of fire, of the building of cities and of civilization; of the triumph of reason; of the filling of the Earth and the reaching out to sea and space.

It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.

For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.

Arthur Conan Doyle

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

Albert Einstein

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.

Bertrand Russell

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.

Gluttony is the vice of feeble minds. The gourmand has his brains in his palate, he can do nothing but eat; he is so stupid and incapable that the table is the only place for him, and dishes are the only things he knows anything about. Let us leave him to this business without regret; it is better for him and for us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

I say, Watson,' he whispered, 'would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?' 'Not in the least,' I answered in astonishment. 'Ah, that's lucky,' he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

Arthur Conan Doyle

And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.

Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chamber of my brain — Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies Come to life and fade away; What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.

Edgar Allan Poe

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.

Emily Dickinson

There is no such thing as muddle — obscurity, yes — but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.

Agatha Christie

I don't think there was anything in my brain right then except the usual background static — the kind you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.

Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…