Paul Kalanithi Quotes

People love watching medical dramas - they also love watching documentaries about the workings of the brain.

I was always interested in curing the brain.

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

I'm so interested in the brain. I read true crime.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

I really enjoyed my degree, for me it was the best course you can do. To be able to study the brain and nervous system and the mind with a scientific approach is just incredible! Its philosophical, psychological and biological, three very interesting areas to me.

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

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

Yes, I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

My name is not 'William Shatner.'

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

The brain isn't like the heart. They learned how to transplant a heart. The brain is more complex.

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.

I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending.

You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone's brain.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

I wanted to be a neurologist. That seemed to be the most difficult, most intriguing, and the most important aspect of medicine, which had links with psychology, aggression, behavior, and human affairs.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.

For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.