Brains Vs Brawn Quotes

Unlike Champions, Godmothers don't have to keep undergoing ridiculous ordeals every time one turns around. Our idea of besting a dragon is not to chop it into bits, but to get it to sit down to tea. ~ Mercedes Lackey

There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body. ~ Richard Dawkins

One brain's blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive. (152) ~ Thomas Lewis

I got my face close up to the man still standing. I let him understand that there was oodles of danger in me; my head wobbled loose, three ticks off center. This scary face is all them such as me has to show this other world, the world in charge of our world, that musters any authority, gets any reluctant respect at all. If us lower elements didn't show our teeth plenty and act fast to bite, we'd just be soft, loamy dirt anybody could walk on, anytime, and you know they would, too, since even with a show of teeth there's a grassless path worn clear across our brains and backs. ~ Daniel Woodrell

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds. ~ John N. Gray

When the 'weaker' of the two brains (right and left) is stimulated and encouraged to work in cooperation with the stronger side, the end result is a great increase in overall ability and ... often five to ten times more effectiveness. ~ Robert E. Ornstein

Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains! ~ Humphrey Bogart

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

I think,' said the little Queen, smiling, 'that your friend must be the richest man in all the world.' 'I am,' returned the Scarecrow; 'but not on account of my money. For I consider brains to be far superior to money, in every way. You may have noticed that if one has money without brains, he cannot use it to advantage; but if one has brains without money, they will enable him to live comfortably to the end of days.' 'At the same time,' declared the Tin Woodman, 'you must acknowledge that a good heart is a thing that brains cannot create, and that money cannot buy. Perhaps, after all it is I who am the richest man in all the world.' 'You are both rich, my friends,' said Ozma gently; 'and your riches are the only riches worth having - the riches of content!' - The Marvellous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum pg 192 chapter 24 ~ L. Frank Baum

a good heart is, I believe, much more desirable than education or brains. ~ L. Frank Baum

Some people say, therefore, that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior. ~ Jane Goodall

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs. ~ Edith Wharton

Money without brains is always dangerous. ~ Napoleon Hill

Love starts having troubles when the brains encroaches on its territory ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

A mob is a group of persons with heads but no brains. ~ Jet Li

Odd thing, ain't it ... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls." "That's mob rule! ~ Terry Pratchett

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can't for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie's reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can't prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free; but even so, surely it is, well, you know…time?
Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity ~ Julian Barnes

A great leader has brains, vision, soul, values and a heart. ~ Klaus Schwab

What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. [O]ur eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies. [W]e can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imag ~ Richard Dawkins

Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind. ~ Philip Roth

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated. ~ Seth Shostak

As usual when I drank too much I started talking about things I should'nt ... That night Kate told me I had no brains and she was officially done with me. OK, fair enough. I already knew that I was an idiot, stepping for the third time in the same shit with the same left foot. ~ Joanna Mazurkiewicz

Tell me, Leonard,' he said. 'Has it ever occurred to you that one day wars will be fought with brains?' Leonard picked up his coffee cup. 'Oh dear. Won't that be rather messy?' he said. ~ Terry Pratchett

The left hemisphere is very interested in language; it communicates in words, it has a past, a present, and a future; it has a time component and it's all about details. The right hemisphere is more about the right now-right here experience where everything is an enormous collage of all the sensory systems flooding into our brains. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

Children are like the zombies I once saw in a film at Dad's. We have to do as we're told and obey like our brains have got eaten. ~ Kate Hamer

The brain of the modern human is no longer capable of understanding reality directly. It used to be that a person lived, looked toward the horizon, howled at the moon, and formed his conceptions, however biased, based on his own experiences and observations. There used to be this thing called independent learning. Not anymore. They crystallize our brains like ice from water. Imagine how slowly, starting in childhood, your brain is crystallized for you, forming your conception of reality. We could even determine a unit of currency for all humanity, 'the value of one concept.' Everyone would have their own change purse, so to speak, and the coins in it, though of various values, quantities, styles, and metals, would all be from a single mint. ~ Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

People fall into patterns at fast speeds, when really, to have a clear musical thought - the kind of musical thought that makes a melody work - our brains just can't think that fast. At a certain point, you're going on automatic. ~ John Frusciante

Girls with the beauty-and-brains thing going on are the most intimidating girls in the world. ~ Susane Colasanti

ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY
In Proust's Swann's Way a sip of tea and a bite of a small scallopshaped cake known as a petite madeleine cause the narrator to find himself suddenly flooded with memories from his past. At first he is puzzled, but then, slowly, after much effort on his part, he remembers that his aunt used to give him tea and madeleines when he was a little boy, and it is this association that has stirred his memory. We have all had similar experiences - a whiff of a particular food being prepared, or a glimpse of some long-forgotten object - that suddenly evoke some scene out of our past. The holographic idea offers a further analogy for the associative tendencies of memory. This is illustrated by yet another kind of holographic recording technique. First, the light of a single laser beam is bounced off two objects simultaneously, say an easy chair and a smoking pipe. The light bounced off each object is then allowed to collide, and the resulting interference pattern is captured on film. Then, whenever the easy chair is illuminated with laser light and the light that reflects off the easy chair is passed through the film, a three-dimensional image of the pipe will appear. Conversely, whenever the same is done with the pipe, a hologram of the easy chair appears. So, if our brains function holographically, a similar process may be responsible for the way certain objects evoke specific memories from our past ~ Michael Talbot

The evolution of the human brain is inextricably interwoven with the expansion of culture and the emergence of language. Thus, it is no coincidence that human beings are story tellers. Through countless generations, humans have gathered to listen to stories of the hunt, the exploits of their ancestors, and morality tales of good and evil...Thus, I believe that both the urge to tell a tale and our vulnerability to being captivate by one are deeply woven into the structures of our brains ~ Louis Cozolino

Dogma is a defence against the brain's capacity for free thought based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place. ~ Joe Blow

Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow. ~ Richard Baxter

The largest, and most provocative, sense in which a technological singularity might be an existential opportunity can only be grasped by stepping outside the human perspective altogether and adopting a more cosmological point of view. It is surely the height of anthropocentric thinking to suppose that the story of matter in this corner of the universe climaxes with human society and the myriad living brains embedded in it, marvelous as they are. Perhaps matter still has a long way to go on the scale of complexity. Perhaps there are forms of consciousness yet to arise that are, in some sense, superior to our own. Should we recoil from this prospect, or rejoice in it? Can we even make sense of such an idea? Whether or not the singularity is near, these are questions worth asking, not least because in attempting to answer them we shed new light on ourselves and our place in the order of things.

Murray Shanahan ~ Murray Shanahan

At the base of Ron Paul support, in my opinion, are people with brains. ~ Gary Johnson

Unlike most other language  -  which is stored in cerebral cortex, the brain's center for higher learning  -  curse words are stored in the limbic system, our most basic, lizard brain level. ~ Chelsea G. Summers

Our brains were not designed for us to sit around contemplating what we already have. They were not designed to trigger excitement for no reason. They were designed for us to keep finding new ways to promote survival ~ Anonymous

Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate ~ Twyla Tharp

It was so big, that view. I'll never remember it properly. How can anyone remember something that big? I don't think people's brains are designed for memories like that. They're designed for things like phone numbers, or the color of someone's hair. Not hugeness. ~ Lucy Christopher

If we did not know all His retorts by heart, if we had not taken the sting out of them by incessant repetition in the accents of the pulpit, and if we had not somehow got it into our heads that brains were rather reprehnsible, we should reckon Him among the greatest wits of all time. Nobody else, in three brief years, has achieved such an output of epigram. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs. ~ Michael Shermer