139 Inspiring And Thoughtful Brain Quotes

In a world where the mind is both a powerful tool and a source of endless intrigue, exploring the depths of our thoughts and intellect offers boundless inspiration. Our brains, the epicenters of creativity, emotion, and reason, have captivated thinkers, scientists, and dreamers alike for centuries. Delving into thoughtful reflections and profound insights from some of history's greatest minds, these 139 brain quotes promise to ignite your curiosity and stimulate intellectual growth. Join us on this enlightening journey as we celebrate the wonders of human cognition through inspiring and thought-provoking words.

1. “I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain.An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field.” - Jay Ingram

2. “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

3. “Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.” - Steve Grand

4. “If I could put my brain in her body, the world would be mine for the taking.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

5. “A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

6. “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” - Dalai Lama XIV

7. “Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought.Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

8. “A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced” - Graham Greene

9. “God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.” - Walter de la Mare

10. “It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.” - Francis Crick

11. “... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.” - Michael Crichton

12. “To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you.” - Daniel Amen

13. “The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that's all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain.The only correct answer to 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' is 'Because it's lizard brain told it to.' Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain.The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It's real, and it's living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.The lizard brain is the reason you're afraid, the reason you don't do all the art you can, the reason you don't ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.” - Seth Godin

14. “This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.” - Cormac McCarthy

15. “I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

16. “New research into cognitive functioning—how the brain works—proves that bullet points are the least effective way to deliver important information. Neuroscientists are finding that what passes as a typical presentation is usually the worst way to engage your audience.” - Carmine Gallo

17. “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” - Emerson M. Pugh

18. “As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.” - Santiago Ramón y Cajal

19. “Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully."Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever.""And he has Brain.""Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."There was a long silence."I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.” - A.A. Milne

20. “But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.” - George Carlin

21. “Life is unlikely to end with humans, even if we burn in a nuclear holocaust. The relentless wheel of evolution will pick up from where we leave off and roll to it's predestined goal. If the human mind continues to evolve, enlarge, and expand, so that we are able to recognize our kinship with the creations around us, so that we are able to grasp our oneness with the cosmos, and so that we merge in yoga with the Divine, the long cosmic cycle will disclose its cryptic secret, and the long saga of billions of years of evolution will display its profound significance.” - Roy J. Mathew

22. “No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.” - A.A. Milne

23. “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.” - Steven Pinker

24. “Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah."Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me.” - Orson Scott Card

25. “Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.” - Corneliu E Giurgea

26. “The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.” - Timothy Leary

27. “What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.” - Kurt Vonnegut

28. “You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.” - Julian Barnes

29. “Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.” - Winifred Gallagher

30. “A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.” - Michael Crichton

31. “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

32. “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” - William Shakespeare

33. “The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.” - Mary E. Pearson

34. “To some education is just a bore; to most education is food for the brain and enrichment for the present and future.” - Ana Monnar

35. “How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.” - Gail Carriger

36. “My brain tells me it will be better to just let him go.My heart... not so much.” - Simone Elkeles

37. “My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.” - William Shakespeare

38. “it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked” - Thomas Gilovich

39. “It is your brain that decides to get you out of bed in the morning to exercise, togive you a stronger, leaner body, or to cause you to hit the snooze button andprocrastinate your workout. It is your brain that pushes you away from the table tellingyou that you have had enough, or that gives you permission to have the second bowl ofRocky Road ice cream, making you look and feel like a blob. It is your brain thatmanages the stress in your life and relaxes you so that you look vibrant, or, when leftunchecked, sends stress signals to the rest of your body and wrinkles your skin. And it isyour brain that turns away cigarettes, too much caffeine, and alcohol, helping you lookand feel healthy, or that gives you permission to smoke, to have that third cup of coffee,or to drink that third glass of wine, thus making every system in your body look and feelolder.Your brain is the command and control center of your body. If you want a betterbody, the first place to ALWAYS start is by having a better brain.” - Daniel G. Amen

40. “Your brain is involved in everything you do.Your brain controls everything you do, feel, and think. When you look in themirror, you can thank your brain for what you see. Ultimately, it is your brain thatdetermines whether your belly bulges over your belt buckle or your waistline is trim andtoned. Your brain plays the central role in whether your skin looks fresh and dewy or isetched with wrinkles. Whether you wake up feeling energetic or groggy depends on yourbrain. When you head to the kitchen to make breakfast, it is your brain that determineswhether you go for the leftover pizza or the low-fat yogurt and fruit. Your brain controlswhether you hit the gym or sit at the computer to check your Facebook page. If you feelthe need to light up a cigarette or drink a couple cups of java, that's also your brain'sdoing.ACTION STEP Remember that your brain is involved in everything you do, everydecision you make, every bite of food you take, every cigarette you smoke, everyworrisome thought you have, every workout you skip, every alcoholic beverage youdrink, and more.” - Daniel G. Amen

41. “Your brain is the organ of your personality, character, andintelligence and is heavily involved in making you who you are.” - Daniel G. Amen

42. “God is logic's corpse, a wound in reason, grammar's empty skin. (1998)It is as obvious to my left brain that there is no God, as it is obvious to my right brain that the living God is all there is. (2018)” - Jamey Hecht

43. “When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way.” - Madeleine L'Engle

44. “We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.” - Siri Hustvedt

45. “Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.” - Siri Hustvedt

46. “Learn to deal with the fact that you are not a perfect person but you are a person that deserves respect and honesty.” - Pandora Poikilos

47. “Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.” - Adam Gopnik

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

49. “...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.” - Daniel J. Siegel

50. “Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.- Why is that?- What’s that, Marshal?- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?- I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.- How come?- Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right?- Sure.- Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.- I’ll buy that.- Human brain,- Trey said, - is over fifty percent water.- No kidding?- No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.” - Dennis Lehane

51. “What is human memory?" Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience - as perhaps he was. "It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events. "In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it's true to say that everything I remember is false.” - Arthur C. Clarke

52. “I'm convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease.” - Brandon Sanderson

53. “The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about.” - Eileen Cook

54. “The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?” - Burkhard Bilger

55. “One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.” - Burkhard Bilger

56. “It’s clear that if we use the mind attentively, mental power is increased, and if we concentrate the mind in the moment, it is easier to coordinate mind and body. But in terms of mind and body unity, is there something we can concentrate on that will reliably aid us in discovering this state of coordination? In Japan, and to some degree other Asian countries, people have historically focused mental strength in the hara (abdomen) as a way of realizing their full potential. Japan has traditionally viewed the hara as the vital center of humanity in a manner not dissimilar to the Western view of the heart or brain. I once read that years ago Japanese children were asked to point to the origin of thoughts and feelings. They inevitably pointed toward the abdominal region. When the same question was asked of American children, most pointed at their heads or hearts. Likewise, Japan and the West have commonly held differing views of what is physical power or physical health, with Japan emphasizing the strength of the waist and lower body and Western people admiring upper body power. (Consider the ideal of the sumo wrestler versus the V-shaped Western bodybuilder with a narrow waist and broad shoulders.)However, East and West also hold similar viewpoints regarding the hara, and we’re perhaps not as dissimilar as some might imagine. For instance, hara ga nai hito describes a cowardly person, “a person with no hara.” Sounds similar to our saying that so-and-so “has no guts,” doesn’t it?” - H.E. Davey

57. “Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.” - Marc Bekoff

58. “This was just no fun. I wanted my brain back.” - Jeff Lindsay

59. “I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.” - Max Barry

60. “i want to pull very long, multi-colored strings out of my brain and place them next to a bowl of doritos at a party” - Megan Boyle

61. “I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.” - Graham Hancock

62. “Stuff your brain with knowledge.” - Karl Lagerfeld

63. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,And Mourners to and froKept treading – treading – till it seemedThat Sense was breaking through – And when they all were seated,A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thoughtMy Mind was going numb – And then I heard them lift a BoxAnd creak across my SoulWith those same Boots of Lead, again,Then Space – began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,And Being, but an Ear,And I, and Silence, some strange RaceWrecked, solitary, here – And then a Plank in Reason, broke,And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge,And Finished knowing – then –” - Emily Dickinson

64. “If the brain was simple enough to be understood - we would be too simple to understand it!” - Minsky M.A.

65. “When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.” - Criss Jami

66. “In a general sense, I admit to valuing the worldviews of men under the age of 40 and women over the age of 30.” - Criss Jami

67. “No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.” - Jodi Picoult

68. “There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.” - Oliver W. Sacks

69. “We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.” - John C. Eccles

70. “The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.” - António R. Damásio

71. “There's someone in my head, but it's not me."Pink FloydDavid Eagleman” - David Eagleman, Pink Floyd

72. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.(quoted in Incognito )” - C.G. Jung

73. “I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.” - Peter Bognanni

74. “She has man's brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and woman's heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me when He made that so good combination.” - Bram Stoker

75. “The x-ray of your skull shows a large, flobby mass floating inside. I have to consult my colleagues to be certain, but it looks like a long sausage snarled into a lump.” - Benson Bruno

76. “If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.” - Tom Robbins

77. “Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.” - Grant Morrison

78. “We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)” - Nicholas Carr

79. “The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.” - John Green

80. “It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

81. “The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.” - Rodolfo R. Llinás

82. “I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.” - Criss Jami

83. “my problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ...they at least make my art more interesting” - Hiroko Sakai

84. “My body is tired as worn out rug, but my brain (if i had) is always full of curiosity, jumping around for seeking new funs. If they could learn how to be cooperative each others, my life could be way easier... sigh*” - Hiroko Sakai

85. “It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.” - Terry Pratchett

86. “It made my blood boil so hot, my brain stopped working right.” - Neal Shusterman

87. “A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.” - Criss Jami

88. “This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

89. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan

90. “Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.” - Neal Stephenson

91. “Silencing the brain's ramblings gives the chance for wonderful thoughts to bloom.” - Steven Redhead

92. “Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.” - James Henry Breasted

93. “The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.” - James Henry Breasted

94. “[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence” go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.” - Nicholas G. Carr

95. “The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.” - Alain De Botton

96. “L'amore è come una clessidra: man mano che il cuore si riempie, il cervello si svuota.” - Jules Renard

97. “In that nanosecond of enlightenment I knew that the human spirit survives the death of the physical body and I understood that my wandering soul needed to get back into its earthly habitat.” - Janet Bettag

98. “What he found impossible was to shut off his brain, to detach himself from the intriguing problems with which (he) was involved, or to leave alone the major problems of war and peace, race and poverty, man's inhumanity to man and the persistence of stupidity.” - Zelda Popkin

99. “Not all tongues that wag cohabit with a brain.” - Donita K. Paul

100. “Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.” - Nessa Carey

101. “The most powerful sex organ was the brain, you know what that meansPoor Justin!” - Sarah Strohmeyer

102. “Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.” - Peter Watts

103. “But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.” - Peter Watts

104. “It's a mind, it works by metaphor.” - Simon J. Townley

105. “The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.” - Criss Jami

106. “Life is about solving for x” - Jane Lescarbeau

107. “A hidden spark of the dream sleeps In the forest and waits In the celestial spheres of the brain.” - Dejan Stojanovic

108. “Tutti dicono che il cervello sia l'organo più complesso del corpo umano, da medico potrei anche acconsentire. Ma come donna vi assicuro che non vi è niente di più complesso del cuore, ancora oggi non si conoscono i suoi meccanismi. Nei ragionamenti del cervello c'è logica, nei ragionamenti del cuore ci sono le emozioni.” - Rita Levi-Montalcini

109. “Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!” - Terry Pratchett

110. “without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.” - Arnold Bennett

111. “[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

112. “A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.("Three O'Clock")” - Cornell Woolrich

113. “You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.” - Sam Harris

114. “When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” - Criss Jami

115. “The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school.” - Paul Tough

116. “I need something, Wax. A place to look. You always did the thinking.”“Yes, having a brain helps with that, surprisingly.” - Brandon Sanderson

117. “Most of everything is very little of not very much at all.” - Richard Edward Harding

118. “Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.” - V.S. Ramachandran

119. “My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

120. “Without a response, I just stand there like an idiot. Like she just slapped my brain out of my skull and I can’t think.” - Rebecca A. Rogers

121. “The brain has only three functions: open, closed, or deprived.” - Anthony Liccione

122. “Reading is food for the brain.” - Maribel Pagan

123. “In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.” - István Aranyosi

124. “Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.” - David Eagleman

125. “There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.” - David Eagleman

126. “Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: "If thou examinest a man having a wound in the temple, ...; if thou ask of him concerning his malady and he speak not to thee; ...; thou shouldst say concerning him, 'One having a wound in his temple, ... (and) he is speechless'.” - James Henry Breasted

127. “Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.” - Christopher Morley

128. “One of the unique things about the human brain is that it can do only what it thinks it can do. The minute you say, "My memory isn't what it used to be ..." you are actually training your brain to live up to your diminished expectations.Low expectations mean low results.The first rule of super brain is that your brain is always eavesdropping on your thoughts. As it listens, it leans. If you teach it about limitation, your brain will become limited. But what if you do the opposite? What if you teach your brain to be unlimited?” - Deepak Chopra

129. “Nobody really enjoys having to pacify their feelings. It's too much like failure; it reminds you of weakness. but feelings don't want to be pacified, either. They want to be fulfilled. You fulfill your positive feelings (love, hope, optimism, appreciation, approval) by connecting with other people, expressing your best self. You fulfill your negative feelings by releasing them. Your whole system recognizes negative feelings as toxic. It's futile to bottle them up, divert them, ignore them, or try to rise above them. Either negativity is leaving or it's hanging on - it has no other alternative. As you fulfill emotions, your brain will change and form new patterns, which is the whole goal.” - Deepak Chopra

130. “Eat some food.” - Jed Hansen

131. “You’re an English major, aren't you?” “Hey!” Immediately retreating, Keith swatted at him with a dishcloth. “Leave my brain alone. It’s resting.” “Sorry, sorry.” He leaned away, hands up to display his surrender. “I didn't mean it, I take it back.” “You’d better” - Matthew Haldeman-Time

132. “Your brain is like a plant. If you plant a seed in it, it will grow into a big idea.” - Jane Kang

133. “Humankind made these religions; that our brains are capable of doing that is neither something to take too seriously — because we also make poop, and we learned to flush that the fuck down the toilet — but it's also not something to totally disregard.” - Dan Harmon

134. “People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.” - Douglas Coupland

135. “You are not really free, and that is why you do not know what I am talking about.” - Bryant McGill

136. “Idols of the injury,dug in behind the least understoodmotor plan information.The vile abomination temporal lobes andThe four loathsome memory walls andThe four reasoning, arithmetic beastsare found for all behind pain and planes.Portrayed as a house,Go in, function, cause blindness fromThe house's hearing spirit, judgment andThe court's four bronze woes andThe functioning brain lobe wings,Go in, hearing and perception,I dig under door fronts, pain and plans.” - Bill Ectric

137. “My brain as the engine, with thoughts trailing to the caboose, on a one-track mind we keep going forward.” - Anthony Liccione

138. “Had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.” - P.G. Wodehouse

139. “My upstairs brain and my downstairs brain engaged in a game of risk and it was downstairs’ turn to roll the dice.” - Penny Reid