Quotes from Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Unfortunately, nature seems unaware of our intellectual need for convenience and unity, and very often takes delight in complication and diversity.

Intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and only for it rather than for the future good of humanity does the scholar condemn himself to arduous and painful labors.

Nothing inspires more reverence and awe in me than an old man who knows how to change his mind.

Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

It is notorious that the desire to live increases as life itself shortens.

What a cruel irony of fate, to pair together, like Siamese twins united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character!

Every man if he so desires becomes sculptor of his own brain.

In summary, all great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with tenacious concentration on a subject over a period of months or years.

That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith, hardly ever.