George Lakoff Quotes

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

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

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

God designed the stomach to eject what is bad for it, but not the human brain.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

Your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate. There's a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together. I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.

the brain works better if the hand works too.

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

Nothing, in all of the Universe is more delicious than to be in this physical body allowing the fullness that is you to be present in the moment.