Brain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.

I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Different types of dangerous lives-You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe in myself. I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love.

Richard Branson

There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

G. K. Chesterton

The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the primary way in which the sensory receptacle of the brain may more fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature, and the ear is the second, gaining nobility through the recounting of things which the eye has seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously...

Arthur Conan Doyle

The human brain is the most magnificently organized lump of material in the known universe.

This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

Arthur Conan Doyle

If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

Theodor W. Adorno

Our worthy engineer belonged to that class of men whose brain is always on the boil, like a kettle on a hot fire. In some of these brain kettles the ideas bubble over, in others they just simmer quietly.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Arthur Schopenhauer

How laudable it is for a prince to keep good faith and live with integrity, and not with astuteness, every one knows. Still the experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men's brains, and who have ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation.

Niccolò Machiavelli

When I understood the task, it was not with a resolve such as men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt that the battle was won. Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could net yet give it outward expression.

Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.

William Shakespeare

Not your flesh nor bones shall bejudge in the A'khira (Judgement day), but your brain, the centre of consciousness where you reside. You as a soul shall be judged.

Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor: Therein the patient Must minister to himself. Macbeth: Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.

William Shakespeare

When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.