Brain Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole's and an archbishop's. It's a marvelous race, by long odds the most marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose.

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved

Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you;
plug up my ears, and I can still hear;
even without feet I can walk toward you,
and without mouth I can still implore.
Break off my arms, and I will hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand;
strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb;
and should you set fire to my brain,
I still can carry you with my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

SAGREDO: My brain already reels. My mind, like a cloud momentarily illuminated by a lightening-flash, is for an instant filled with an unusual light, which now beckons to me and which now suddenly mingles and obscures strange, crude ideas.

Galileo Galilei

You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

'The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively....

Thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.

William Shakespeare

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.

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

Agatha Christie

There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.

Vincent van Gogh

With your head full of brains,
and your shoes full of feet,
You're too smart to go down any not-so-good-street.

A light broke in upon my brain, —
It was the carol of a bird;
It ceased, and then it came again,
The sweetest song ear ever heard.

Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

William Shakespeare

Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

G. K. Chesterton

A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It
ascends me into the brain,... makes it apprehensive, quick,
forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.

William Shakespeare

But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mere seizes me I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no grey cells, no order, no method — a mere member of the human race somewhere below average intelligence!

Agatha Christie