Magic Of The Brain Quotes

Consciousness is a magic of our brain and an illusion of our mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

It's worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it's within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I will love you forever," I murmured, and he stroked the hair off of my forehead.
I will hold you to that." His face was grim and his voice was sober - he
touched my handprint of chaos as he said it, and I knew in my bones that it was a solemn vow, and not a sweet or a kind offering of love at all. Green would make me live if he had to crack the foundations of the world. ~ Amy Lane

I spend a lot of time upside down. It increases the blood flow to the brain, so it really helps your creativity. ~ Daphne Guinness

Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity. ~ Norman Cousins

The swamp roses, Gillie. It was the mare found them. She - if she hadn't run off - it was almost as if she meant me to see them."
"Are you saying? ... "
"I don't know what I'm saying. Yes," she cried, a gay silliness taking her. Drunk with the music and the dancing, drunk with his closeness, she laughed up at him. It was just as in the stories, a kind of magic just like ... " and then she stared at him, confounded.
"Just like what?"
"But in the stories ... "
"In the stories ... what?"
"In the stories ... "
"In the stories there's a prince," Gillie answered quietly. He held her away then. "So the story has come true. ~ Shirley Rousseau Murphy

the 'magic cave' enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement. ~ Slavoj Zizek

…though he no longer wanted to be a magician, he still had magic in his hands. I knew because when he squeezed mine, the tingle spread to my chest. It was like being in another world, safe and out of the way. ~ Dinah Jefferies

This is the miracle of all miracles - when life sacrifices itself to become something greater. When it awakens to its potential and rises in power. That is true magic. ~ Seth Adam Smith

Call upon the Goddess and God to protect you and teach you the secrets of magic.
Ask stones and plants to reveal their powers - and listen. ~ Scott Cunningham

The Shraken-nurse turned on the nozzles for each of the drips, and the contents began to work their respective ways through his system. The left drip had a chill to it that made him feel like he was bathing in a ice-bath pumped full of extra strong Earth-based mint; while the right hand fluids were warm and fuzzy, like he was four years old and sleeping in a barrelful of teddy-bears on a hot summer's day. They quickly found their way up to his brain, and collided there in a meeting of hot and cold that, had the encounter happened in the atmosphere, would have produced the biggest cumulus cloud in the cosmos. ~ John K. Irvine

The Mission is to do one's passion work, which is the chariot you ride in the BECOMING part of existence. ~ Bill Harvey

We now know that the way to help a child develop optimally is to help create connections in her brain - her whole brain - that develop skills that lead to better relationships, better mental health, and more meaningful lives. You could call it brain sculpting, or brain nourishing, or brain building. Whatever phrase you prefer, the point is crucial, and thrilling: as a result of the words we use and the actions we take, children's brains will actually change, and be built, as they undergo new experiences. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

Mere words cannot defeat a true hero. Unless they happen to be the words to some sort of Instant Death Spell. Magic is scary. ~ Christopher Healy

This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncom ~ Neal Stephenson

When parties in a state are violent, he offered a wonderful contrivance to reconcile them. The method is this:
You take a hundred leaders of each party; you dispose them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size; then let two nice operators saw off the occiput of each couple at the same time, in such a manner that the brain may be equally divided. Let the occiputs, thus cut off, be interchanged, applying each to the head of his opposite party-man. It seems indeed to be a work that requires some exactness, but the professor assured us, "that if it were dexterously performed, the cure would be infallible." For he argued thus: "that the two half brains being left to debate the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to a good understanding, and produce that moderation, as well as regularity of thinking, so much to be wished for in the heads of those, who imagine they come into the world only to watch and govern its motion: and as to the difference of brains, in quantity or quality, among those who are directors in faction, the doctor assured us, from his own knowledge, that "it was a perfect trifle. ~ Jonathan Swift

There's a special part of Messi's brain allowing him to see the split-second chaos of football in his own personal super slow motion. ~ Carles Puyol

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative. ~ Gemma Files

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

[Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together. ~ Elizabeth Hand

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. ~ David Goodis

Some people see a magic trick and say, "Impossible!" They clap their hands, turn over their money, and forget about it ten minutes later. Other people ask how it worked. They go home, get into bed, toss and turn, wondering how it was done. It takes them a good night's sleep to forget all about it. And then there are the ones who stay awake, running through the trick again and again, looking for that skip in perception, the crack in the illusion that will explain how their eyes got duped; they're the kind who won't rest until they've mastered that little bit of mystery for themselves. I'm that kind. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He's found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants. ~ Joshua Foer

My brain must have felt sorry for me, so it'd created the only type of guy I could touch - a fantasy one. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, always has a last veil left to fold in. ~ Arthur Koestler

The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious - such as digging up and mutilating the dead. ~ C.S. Lewis

Exercise is the single best thing you can do for your brain in terms of mood, memory, and learning. ~ John Ratey

You listen to me, and listen good!" she shouted, shocking me. "I am not evil because I have a thousand years of demon smut on my soul!" she exclaimed, the tips of her hair trembling and her face flushed. "Every time you disturb reality, nature has to balance it out. The black on your soul isn't evil, it's a promise to make up for what you have done. It's a mark, not a death sentence. And you can get rid of it given time."
"Ceri, I'm sorry," I fumbled, but she wasn't listening.
"You're an ignorant, foolish, stupid witch," she berated, and I cringed, my grip tightening on the copper spell pot and feeling the anger from her like a whip. "Are you saying because I carry the stink of demon magic, that I'm a bad person?"

"No..." I wedged in.

"That God will show no pity?" she said, green eyes flashing. "That because I made one mistake in fear that led to a thousand more that I will burn in hell?"

"No. Ceri -" I took a step forward.

"My soul is black," she said, her fear showing in her suddenly pale cheeks. "I'll never be rid of it all before I die, but it won't be because I'm a bad person but because I was a frightened one. ~ Kim Harrison

Their dark silhouettes numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they're born. ~ Haruki Murakami

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject. ~ Dick Cavett

Billy helped," Jethro said, his voice held hesitation.

"Billy?" Duane didn't try to mask his surprise; he and Beau stared at each other, communicating for several seconds without talking. The twins' ability to impart thoughts through a look had always been frustrating. I didn't like being left out of a conversation.

"Yes. Billy. Billy helped," I confirmed irritably. "And will you two cease discussing with your eyeballs. There are several other people in the room who can't brain-link."

Duane lifted an eyebrow, his eyes darting from me to Beau and then quickly to the floor. "Fine, Cletus. Cool your engine."

I grunted, but said nothing. I didn't want to pick a fight with Duane. I only had a few more weeks of him hanging around and the thought depressed me. He was a grumpy, brooding little bastard who had the habit of only speaking when spoken to - and sometimes not even then. I was going to miss him. ~ Penny Reid

She had always enjoyed the warm, calming feeling of the sand. It slipped as a silken scarf of liquid sunshine across the surface of her skin. Kayn took one hand and ran it over the surface of the sand, and it shifted as though it had been moved by a light breeze without her hand making contact. Her life now had no room for feet being firmly planted on the ground. She had to allow her mind to take off in flight and accept the impossible. She had to embrace life as a toddler. In a child's world, every breath of life is a mystery; everything had the possibility of being magic. ~ Kim Cormack

I offer you a fable for our times...
A magic box sits in your pocket with all the knowledge and music and entertainment of the world contained within it.
If you opened this box and looked down into it...
...How could you ever possibly look up again?
- Larry Ferrell (Unfollow) ~ Rob Williams

I went to some classes. Vampire was in the Hair of Magical Magic Creatures. He looked all depressed because Draco had disappeared and he had used to be in love with Draco. He was sucking some blood from a Hufflepuff. ~ Tara Gilesbie