This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic... in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the rounds of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might;the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who does not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the only way in which Mr. Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied ...with them till they took up all the room in his brain. But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand. Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops... or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is now well known that women are biologically somewhat less lateralized in brain function than men. This means simply that psyc...hological functions in women are not localized into one or the other hemisphere of the brain to the same degree as in men. Mental abilities in women are more spread over both hemispheres. Even by age six, for example, a boy can recognize objects in his left hand by feel alone better than in his right hand. In girls both hands are equal. This shows that haptic recognition (as it is called) has already been primarily localized in the right hemisphere in boys but not in girls. And it is common knowledge that elderly men with a stroke or hemorrhage in the left hemisphere are more speechless than elderly women with a similar diagnosis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People having speech defects sometimes learn part of the practice by laborious study, but good speech is always mainly unconscious... speech. Any tennis player, even if he could not explain this enigma, could provide an analogy for it. When he sees a rapidly flying tennis ball coming toward him, he knows what he must do. He must maneuver himself into the proper position, be poised with his weight properly distributed, meet the ball with the proper sweep of his arm and with his racket held at just the right pitch, and all this must be timed to stop the flying ball at a precise point. But if the tennis player pauses to think of all these actions and how he will perform them, he is lost. The ball will not skim back over the net, building air pressure as it goes until it buzzes down into the opponent's corner. If the tennis player thinks about anything except where he wants the ball to go and what he plans for the next stroke, he will probably become so awkward that he will be lucky to hit the ball at all. Rapid, precise muscular actions can be successfully carried out only by the unconscious part of the brain. And so with the speaker. He cannot speak well unless he speaks unconsciously, for his movements are as precise, as complicated, and as exactly timed as those of the tennis player.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking abo...ut the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and tri...gonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death o...f socialism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other exp...erience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discovery a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first--that is the idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »