Brain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Emily Dickinson

When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

One must apply one's reason to everything here, learning to obey, to shut up, to help, to be good, to give in, and I don't know what else. I'm afraid I shall use up all my brains too quickly, and I haven't got so very many. Then I shall not have any left for when the war is over.

Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't you think?

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn't get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: "Yank it off, boy, what does it matter." I did so and his possessions were now mine.

It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking.

William Shakespeare

A collection of a hundred great brains makes one big fathead.

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

William Shakespeare

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

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.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)

William Shakespeare

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.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Michel de Montaigne

Human life—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

The nervous fluid in man is consumed by the brain; in woman, by the heart: it is there that they are the most sensitive.

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

War!
The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting and killing?

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.

George Bernard Shaw

It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau