A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.

Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

Meditation is a magical way to merge the finite mind with the universal infinite mind.

The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.

I had to overcome challenge after challenge in order to take my life from nothing to living my dreams.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

Men who neglect philosophy while busying themselves with ordinary affairs are like the Suitors [in the Odyssey] who desired Penelope but went to bed with her maids.

I would say I'm waiting for, I guess, designers to open up their vision.

People who live in a glass house have to answer the door.

The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality.

I know what you're thinking... and you oughtta be ashamed of yourself.