90 Inspirational Brain Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, finding inspiration can sometimes seem like a daunting task. Yet, inspiration often lies within the intricacies of our own minds. Welcome to our curated collection of the top 90 inspirational brain quotes, a captivating journey through thoughts and words that spark motivation and insight. Whether you're looking for a mental boost or seeking to appreciate the wonders of the human brain, these quotes offer profound reflections and encouragement. Join us as we delve into the musings of thinkers, scientists, and creatives who have explored the vast potential of our cerebral landscapes. Let these words awaken your curiosity and inspire your imagination.

1. “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

2. “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

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

4. “... 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

5. “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

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

7. “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

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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. "Hey, YOU!" are the sea's exact words. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.” - Dave Barry

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

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

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

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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “...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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

34. “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

35. “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

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

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

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

39. “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

40. “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

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

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

43. “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

44. “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

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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

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

54. “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

55. “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

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

57. “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

58. “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

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

60. “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

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

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

63. “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

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

65. “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

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

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

68. “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

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

70. “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

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

72. “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

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

74. “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

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

76. “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

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

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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Eat some food.” - Jed Hansen

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

84. “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

85. “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

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

87. “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

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

89. “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

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