Without ducking responsibility, what's wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.

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.

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

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

If you cannot teach others what you have learned, then you have learned nothing.

Not really a party until someone brings the surprise zombies.

The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,

It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything.

I'll probably pay more attention to the musicians in the pit than the stars because they're the closest you're going to get to normal people in the audience.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.