Brain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

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

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.

Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

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

Arthur Conan Doyle

Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Greatness means strife for nation and man alike. A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

Theodore Roosevelt

C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

The seat of the soul and the control of voluntary movement — in fact, of nervous functions in general, — are to be sought in the heart. The brain is an organ of minor importance.

All the marvels of science and the gains of culture belong to the nation as a whole, and never again will man's brain and human genius be used for oppression and exploitation.

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.