Santiago Ramon Y Cajal Quotes

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.

Physical pain is easily forgotten, but a moral chagrin lasts indefinitely.

Every man if he so desires becomes sculptor of his own brain.

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.

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.

To know the brain ... is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

What a wonderful stimulant it would be for the beginner if his instructor, instead of amazing and dismaying him with the sublimity of great past achievements, would reveal instead the origin of each scientific discovery, the series of errors and missteps that preceded it - information that, from a human perspective, is essential to an accurate explanation of the discovery. Skillful pedagogical tactics such as this would instill the conviction that the discoverer, along with being an illustrious person of great talent and resolve, was in the final analysis a human being just like everyone else.

The worst part is not in making a mistake but in trying to justify it, instead of using it as a heaven-sent warning of our mindlessness or our ignorance.

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.

It is notorious that the desire to live increases as life itself shortens.

I would be the last to deny that the greatest scientific pioneers belonged to an aristocracy of the spirit and were exceptionally intelligent, something that we as modest investigators will never attain, no matter how much we exert ourselves. Nevertheless ... I continue to believe that there is always room for anyone with average intelligence ... to utilize his energy and ... any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the least gifted may, like the poorest land that has been well-cultivated and fertilized, produce an abundant harvest..

The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and great stretches of unknown territory.

What a cruel irony of fate, to pair together, like Siamese twins united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character!

The mediocre can be educated; geniuses educate themselves.

It is strange to see how the populace, which nourishes its imagination with tales of witches or saints, mysterious events and extraordinary occurrences, disdains the world around it as commonplace, monotonous and prosaic, without suspecting that at bottom it is all secret, mystery, and marvel.