Claude Bernard Quotes

I like the cerebral process.

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh, unconscious cerebration.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

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.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

The real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Remembering is a great invention of the mind.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

Reason is the miner's lamp used in bringing up ore from the mind.

Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.

dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.