If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Categorized in : Morning Intellectual Flower

Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

grey-matter butterfly garden

The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and great stretches of unknown territory.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

brain numbers world

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

reflection brain long

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.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

perseverance work patience

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

desire brain men

The worst part is not in making a mistake but in trying to justify it, instead of using it as a heaven-sent warning of our mindlessness or our ignorance.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

heaven-sent ignorance mistake

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

diversity nature intellectual

There are no small problems. Problems that appear small are large problems that are not understood

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

small-problems understood problem

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

nerves adults may

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

reason mind

It is idle to dispute with old men. Their opinions, like their cranial sutures, are ossified.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

disputes opinion men

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.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

history-of-life intimate brain

In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

eye research science

Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba—outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another—before interdigitating with related ideas.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

work time ideas

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."

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

writing science years

I would be the last to deny that the greatest scientific pioneers belonged to an aristocracy of the spirit and were exceptionally intelligent, something that we as modest investigators will never attain, no matter how much we exert ourselves. Nevertheless ... I continue to believe that there is always room for anyone with average intelligence ... to utilize his energy and ... any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the least gifted may, like the poorest land that has been well-cultivated and fertilized, produce an abundant harvest.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

intelligent men believe

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

men science knowledge

Physical pain is easily forgotten, but a moral chagrin lasts indefinitely.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

moral lasts pain

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

increase notorious desire

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

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

fate together character