Charles Scott Sherrington Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

Charles Scott Sherrington
The terminal path may, to distinguish it from internuncial common paths, be called the final common path. The motor nerve to a muscle is a collection of such final common paths.

Charles Scott Sherrington
A rainbow every morning who would pause
to look at? The wonderful which comes often or is plentifully about us is soon taken for granted. Th at is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it
cannot on occasion be thrown off. To recapture now and then childhood's wonder, is to secure a driving force
for occasional grown-up thoughts.

Charles Scott Sherrington
If we denote excitation as an end-effect by the sign plus (+), and inhibition as end-effect by the sign minus (−), such a reflex as the scratch-reflex can be termed a reflex of double-sign, for it develops excitatory end-effect and then inhibitory end-effect even during the duration of the exciting stimulus.

Charles Scott Sherrington
That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only.

Charles Scott Sherrington
This integrative action in virtue of which the nervous system unifies from separate organs an animal possessing solidarity, an individual, is the problem before us.

Charles Scott Sherrington
With the nervous system intact the reactions of the various parts of that system, the 'simple reflexes', are ever combined into great unitary harmonies, actions which in their sequence one upon another constitute in their continuity what may be termed the 'behaviour'

Charles Scott Sherrington
The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head-mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one.

Charles Scott Sherrington
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

Charles Scott Sherrington
Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth.

Charles Scott Sherrington
Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.

Charles Scott Sherrington
Nature, often as she hugs the old, seems seldom or never to revert to a past once abandoned.... Evolution can scrap but not revive.

Charles Scott Sherrington
A grey rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behavior. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behavior. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make "life" a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially.

Charles Scott Sherrington
More than one way for doing the same thing is provided by the natural constitution of the nervous system. This luxury of means of compassing a given combination seems to offer the means of restitution of an act after its impairment or loss in one of its several forms.

Charles Scott Sherrington