"Operating superficially, the mind is random in its activity and stale in its insights and images. However, with practice and experience the mind is freed from the skull, and the fresh and new can appear as though for the first time. It"
Skulls quotes
217 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside skulls — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity."
"Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull."
"Moreover he saw a skull floating on the surface of the water and he said unto it: Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned."
"You should have seen the look on your skull."
"Reality is inside the skull."
"I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out."
"When you see me smash somebody's skull, you enjoy it."
"Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls."
"It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull."
"Generally speaking, I'm much more in favour of penises entering vaginas than axes entering skulls. But the world seems to accept the violence a lot easier than the sex."
"The human brain is the last, and greatest, scientific frontier. It is truly an internal cosmos that lies contained within our skulls. The more than 100 billion nerve cells and trillion supporting cells that make up your brain and mine constitute the most elaborate structure in the known universe."
"Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?"
"The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull."
"Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic."
"All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them."
"You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected."
"The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing."
"Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull."
"I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts."
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull."