Brains Quotes
More Brains Quotes
The difference between a fast bowler and a good fast bowler is not extra muscle but extra brains.
Fred (Frederick Sewards) Trueman— 1964 FreddieTrueman's Book of Cricket.
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
shirley abbott— p. 1 (opening lines)
With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!
louise burfitt-dons— Video message sent to Joe Biden in response to his suggestions for green jobs (2009)
If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.
john buchan— Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
betty friedan— Ch 13 "The Forfeited Self"
It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.
robert heilbroner— Chapter IX, John Maynard Keynes, p. 240
My mother always told me the best way to learn to deal with a man was to learn to ride a mule. She said they have about equal brains most of the time. Sometimes the mule is smarter.
robert jordan— The Wheel of Time #2: The Great Hunt (1991)
Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.
roger wolcott sperry— "Evolution of the Human Brain" (1964), p. 2
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.
nassim nicholas taleb— p. 105 (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010))
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.
dr. seuss— Oh, the Places You'll Go, by Dr. Seuss (1990, pg. 2)
'Slavery's a thing thet depends on complexion, It's God's law thet fetters on black skins don't chafe; Ef brains wuz to settle it (horrid reflection!) Wich of our onnable body'd be safe?'
james russell lowell— 1848 'The Debate in the Sennit', in the Boston Courier, 3 May, collected in The Biglow Papers: First Series (1848), no. 5.
My brains are going out my nipples.
gina barberi— Radio From Hell (January 13, 2006)
We have very similar brains. But they come out in different personalities.
guy berryman— Chris Martin, on Berryman's reticence
— Scaggs, Austin; Corbijn, Anton (2005-08-25), "COLDPLAY'S QUIET STORM". Rolling Stone. (981):40-46
He [Kippis] might be a very clever man by nature for aught I know, but he laid so many books upon his head that his brains could not move.
robert hall— On Kippis; Gregory’s Life of Hall, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Now, partly that was work, and partly that was brains, but very largely it was having the guts, the guts to be immodest in the right way.
edwin h. land— On the growth of Polaroid, in a statement to employees (25 June 1958), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 198
God has given us our talents, not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our brains and imagination in order to obtain the revelation of true beauty.
louis comfort tiffany— The Art Work of Louis C. Tiffany [biography dictated to Charles de Kay] (Doubleday, Page & Co New York, 1916)
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
Bill Bryson— Pages 446-447, footnote
The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.
stephen jay gould— "Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord.
stephen jay gould— "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...
h. p. lovecraft— "Through the Gates of the Silver Key " - written with E. Hoffman Price, October 1932 - Apr 1933; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 24, No. 1 (July 1934)
Wherever there was a group of people, and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose brains were "all there."
upton sinclair— Section 2 (100%: the Story of a Patriot (1920))
Nothing is more common than energy in money-making, quite independent of any higher object than its accumulation. A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do; spend less than you earn; add guinea to guinea; scrape and save; and the pile of gold will gradually rise.
Samuel Smiles— Ch. X : Money — Its Use and Abuse
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead— Ch. 29, June 10, 1943
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first.
— Speech to the National Press Club (20 March 1914).
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.
— Abu'l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri (973–1058) (Arabic: ?), poet of Ma`arra, quoted in Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1989) by Amin Maalouf
Nursed by stern men with empires in their brains.
james russell lowell— James Russell Lowell, Biglow Papers, Mason and Slidell.
How quickly nature falls into revolt When gold becomes her object! For this the foolish over-careful fathers Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care, Their bones with industry: For this they have engrossed and pil'd up The canker'd heaps of strange-achieved gold; For this they have been thoughtful to invest Their sons with arts and martial exercises.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II (c. 1597-99), Act IV, scene 5, line 66.
We've all heard that little woman who says, "Oh, it's terrible what these young people do to themselves, in my lsi other drugs, is a terrible thing" Then you look, the woman who speaks in this way: you have no eyes, no teeth, no brains, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no warmth, no spirit, nothing, just a stick ... "and avran made ??you wonder how to reduce it in that state teas and pastries and the church.
— Charles Bukowski, "Tales of Ordinary Madness" (1972).
To curle on the ice, does greatly please, Being a manly Scottish exercise; It clears the brains, stirs up the Native Heat, And gives a gallant appetite for Meat.
— 1715 Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).
