Santiago Ramón y Cajal - Advice for a young investigator

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The intellect is presented with phenomena marching in review before the sensory organs. It can be truly useful and productive only when limiting itself to the modest tasks of observation, description, and comparison, and of classification that is based on analogies and differences.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
I believe that excessive admiration for the work of great minds is one of the most unfortunate preoccupations of intellectual youth — along with a conviction that certain problems cannot be attacked, let alone solved, because of one's relatively limited abilities.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
It is certainly true that the scientist's fame is not as great as the playwright or artist's glamour and popularity. People live in a world of sentiment, and it is asking too much of them to provide warmth and support for the heroes of reason.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
If a photographic plate under the center of a lens focused on the heavens is exposed for hours, it comes to reveal stars so far away that even the most powerful telescopes fail to reveal them to the naked eye. In a similar way, time and concentration allow the intellect to perceive a ray of light in the darkness of the most complex problem.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
In summary, all great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with tenacious concentration on a subject over a period of months or years.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
We render a tribute of respect to those who add original work to a library, and withhold it from those who carry a library around in their head.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Today's statesmen undoubtedly have limitations, one of which is not realizing that the greatness and might of nations are the products of science, and that justice, order, and good laws are important but secondary factors in prosperity.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
We may learn a great deal from books, but we learn much more from the contemplation of nature — the reason and occasion for all books.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Hypotheses pass, but facts remain. Theories desert us, facts defend us.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
There are no small problems. Problems that appear small are large problems that are not understood

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba—outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another—before interdigitating with related ideas.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
To solicit the aid of luck is like stirring muddy water to bring objects submerged at the bottom to the top where they can be seen. Every worker would to well to tempt their good luck. Nevertheless, we should not depend on it too much.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
The forging of new truth almost always requires severe abstention and renunciation. During the so-called intellectual incubation period, the investigator should ignore everything unrelated to the problem of interest, like a somnambulist attending only to the voice of the hypnotist.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
The history of civilization proves beyond doubt just how sterile the repeated attempts of metaphysics to guess at nature' s laws have been. Instead, there is every reason to believe that when the human intellect ignores reality and concentrates within, it can no longer explain the simplest inner workings of life' s machinery or of the world around us.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal
In my own view, some advice about what should be known, about what technical education should be acquired, about the intense motivation needed to succeed, and about the carelessness and inclination toward bias that must be avoided is far more useful than all the rules and warnings of theoretical logic.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal