Cerebral Quotes:

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

source: Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.280, Grove Press

topic: Intelligent, Cerebral

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

- Rita Coolidge

source: Interview with Donna Kimura, www.jazzreview.com. January 29, 2011.

topic: Jazz, Mathematical, Cerebral

I completely admire my mother for raising a child with cerebral palsy at home.

- Natalia Vodianova

topic: Mother, Children, Home, Cerebral, Cerebral Palsy

I have a son, Mason, who is disabled - cerebral palsy - and he does not walk independently, sit independently or speak. He uses a talking computer. I started becoming an advocate for him when he was 3 years old.

- Laura San Giacomo

source: "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Son, Years, Talking, Cerebral, Cerebral Palsy

Placing one foot in front of the other, I've climbed to higher lengths. Reaching beyond my own limitations, to show my inner strength. No obstacle too hard, for this warrior to overcome. I'm just a man on a mission, to prove my disability hasn't won.

- Robert M. Hensel

source: Robert M. Hensel, “Beyond Limitations”

topic: Adversity, Warrior, Men, Cerebral, People With Disabilities

Just put one foot in front of the other.

- Austin Peck

source: Joe De Sena (2014). “Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

topic: Feet, Marathon Man, Marathon Motivational, Marathon Running, Marching Forward

I'm not an advocate for disability issues. Human issues are what interest me.

- Aimee Mullins

topic: Issues, Disability, Interest, Cerebral, Cerebral Palsy

How I like claret!...It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down to cool and feverless; then, you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. No; 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments, like a bully looking for his trull, and hurrying from door to door, bouncing against the wainscott, but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step.

- John Keats

topic: Queens, Lying, Wine, Queen Bee, Cerebral

Chess is a natural cerebral high.

- Walter Browne

topic: Chess, Natural, Cerebral

It's a writer's or director's role to be cerebral, whereas for an actor it should be a visceral, gut thing. When the action starts, it's best to turn the brain off and let it become an instinctual thing.

- Natalie Dormer

topic: Brain, Roles, Actors, Cerebral

There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.

- Ray Kurzweil

topic: Understanding, Brain, Development, Cerebral, Articulating

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

- Marcel Duchamp

topic: Art, Breathing, Euphoria, Cerebral

It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

- Charles Darwin

source: Charles Darwin (1884). “Darwinism Stated by Darwin Himself: Characteristic Passages from the Writings of Charles Darwin”

topic: Cerebral, Mental Power

If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.

- Ivan Pavlov

topic: Thinking, Skulls, Darkness, Cerebral, Thinking Person

Too many scholars think of research as purely a cerebral pursuit. If we do nothing with the knowledge we gain, then we have wasted our study. Books can store information better than we can--what we we do that books cannot is interpret. So if one is not going to draw conclusions, then one might as well just leave the information in the texts.

- Brandon Sanderson

source: Brandon Sanderson (2010). “The Way of Kings”, p.462, Macmillan

topic: Book, Thinking, Research, Cerebral

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

- Susan Cain

source: Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.7, Broadway Books

topic: Book, People, Guilt, Cerebral

Humans. Violent but peace-loving. Passionate but cerebral. Humane but cruel. Impulsive but calculating. Generous but selfish. And yet, somehow I knew that they represented the best hope of the galaxy.

- Katherine Applegate

topic: Selfish, Passionate, Violent, Calculating, Cerebral

I found it hard to make friends in school, because I was a cerebral person.

- Lana Del Rey

topic: School, Trust No One, Found, Cerebral

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

- Chuck Klosterman

source: Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. November 15, 2006.

topic: Hate, Moving, Writing, Cerebral, Things You Like

My music is always called "cerebral." It is a way of saying I'm Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy.

- Vijay Iyer

topic: Asian, Way, Music Is, Cerebral

There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.

- Tom Hooper

topic: Thinking, Scary, Intellectual, Cerebral

I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work.

- Audrey Tautou

source: Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

topic: Photography, Writing, World, Cerebral

The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.

- Henry Adams

source: Henry Adams (1986). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.187, Penguin

topic: Women, Science, Isis, Demeter, Cerebral

I wonder, whether, if I had had any education I should have been more, or less, of a fool than I am. It would have deprived me surely of those exquisite moments of mental flatulence which every now and then inflate the cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibilities-of stretching oneself to cosmic limits, and who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

- Alice James

source: Alice James (1934). “Her Brothers Her Journal”

topic: Dream, Giving Up, Reality, Cerebral, Flatulence

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.

- Thomas Huxley

topic: Men, Animal, Brain, Cerebral

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

- Daniel Dennett

source: Daniel Clement Dennett (1998). “Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds”, p.137, MIT Press

topic: Memories, Long, Typical, Cerebral

My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings.

- Aleister Crowley

topic: Quality, Chance, Nervous, Cerebral

My experience of singing, as an actor, was that there's a different creative feeling of freedom. The acting thing is a bit more defined and cerebral. I can see why people would want to cross over. If you have so much freedom on stage then perhaps you want to be confined a bit, and vice versa.

- Orlando Bloom

source: "Orlando Bloom and Juliette Lewis Interview SYMPATHY FOR DELICIOUS". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. April 25, 2011.

topic: People, Creative, Feelings, Cerebral, Confined

My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

- Tracy Morgan

topic: Mother, Brother, Father, Cerebral, Cerebral Palsy

Oh, my goodness, when you're a mother and you just give birth to a child with spina bifida and - or Down's Syndrome or cerebral palsy, there's a bit of a shock you're going to have to go through, a bit of an adjustment curve.

- Joni Eareckson Tada

topic: Mother, Children, Curves, Cerebral, Cerebral Palsy

Music can make the cerebral accessible, the subconscious hummable. It communicates our shared needs and desires as sentient beings better than any other medium.

- Nellie McKay

source: "The Last Oasis of Free and Independent Music" by Nellie McKay, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 5, 2012.

topic: Desire, Needs, Subconscious, Cerebral

Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.

- Oliver Sacks

topic: Blood, Practice, Long, Long Term, Cerebral

As far as vocal preparation goes, it's really an interesting thing for such a fragile instrument and using it properly is like walking a tightrope. I have learned not to do extensive warm-ups. It's really more of a cerebral mind-body connection Zen hippy thing, just knowing your body and figuring out if I do that then I will be able to speak tomorrow.

- Davey Havok

source: Southern Courier, "The Daily Telegraph" Newspaper, February 2010.

topic: Knowing, Interesting, Preparation, Mind Body, Mind Body Connection

The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.

- Ellen Gilchrist

source: Ellen Gilchrist (2008). “A Dangerous Age: A Novel”, p.11, Algonquin Books

topic: Wise, Baby, Race, Cerebral

Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.

- George L. Carlson

topic: Photography, Littles, Intensity, Cerebral

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You "take in" a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.

- Charles Krauthammer

source: "The Joys of Losing". jewishworldreview.com. April 23, 2010.

topic: Basketball, Baseball, Football, Cerebral

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.

- Hans Arp

topic: Reality, Order, Color, Embroidery, Cerebral

I don't think every joke has to be so dadgum cerebral. I mix it up really good, because that's the kind of humor I like. I like the goofy one-liner type stuff.

- Larry the Cable Guy

topic: Thinking, Stuff, Goofy, Cerebral

I always approached the sport from a more cerebral, analytical point of view, a management perspective. I was taking all business classes there at Georgetown, I really enjoyed that. I always sort of looked at football from that perspective.

- Pete Lembo

source: Source: www.usatoday.com

topic: Sports, Football, Views, Cerebral, Georgetown

Sometimes tender, sometimes spiral-eyed-but always, as we say, 'of a mind' -Lily Brown's sonorous and cerebral poems can fire synapses you never knew you had. If you're careful, Rust or Go Missing will keep you on the edge of your head.

- Graham Foust

topic: Fire, Missing, Mind, Cerebral, Synapses

My mother on her death bed told me, 'Where the hell did that kangaroo come from!?' - it just popped out of nowhere and punched her in the head and caused a cerebral hemorrhage, so I thought I'd move to a country where there were no kangaroos!

- Colin Mochrie

topic: Country, Mother, Moving, Kangaroos, Cerebral

The thing about Sondheim is that it does get very cerebral. You do need a faculty with words and a love for the lyrics to not just pull it off, but to have an appreciation for it.

- Lea Salonga

topic: Appreciation, Doe, Needs, Cerebral, Sondheim

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

- Michael Light

topic: Eye, Passion, Views, Olympian Gods, Cerebral

Every time that God navigates my ship, there's nothing cerebral going on. There's very little thought. It's almost as if I have the directions. Every time I try to do it myself, I'm conjuring up my own concoction and trying.

- Lauryn Hill

source: "Lauryn Hill on Integrity". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 18, 2000.

topic: Trying, Littles, Ships, Cerebral, Conjuring

My comedy is for adults, but you can have your kids listen to it. They won't get all the jokes because hopefully I'm more cerebral than a 10-year-old... but if you ask my wife, I'm not!

- Henry Cho

topic: Kids, Years, Wife, Cerebral

I love expression and really connecting with people. As actors, we like to tell stories because they can influence or even change people's lives. It's so cerebral, you never know who you can affect out there.

- Denzel Whitaker

source: Source: aalbc.com

topic: Expression, People, Stories, Cerebral

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

- George Will

topic: Country, Real, Fighting, Parentheses, Cerebral

I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood (Die Hard) with explosions, and I was holding a gun.

- Alan Rickman

source: "Alan Rickman: The Empire Interview". Interview with Nev Pierce, www.empireonline.com. January 14, 2016.

topic: Dark, Gun, Play, Cerebral, Hamptons

For a brief moment, I considered deconstructing the song and going down a cerebral road, but then I realized it would kill what is most powerful about it.

- Annie E. Clark

source: Source: pitchfork.com

topic: Song, Powerful, Moments, Cerebral