I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
When you engage your brain, it just keeps getting fatter and richer and wonderful.
When you have no idea what to do or how to do it, you just need to see and absorb as much as you possibly can and just fill your vocabulary and your brain with as much as humanly possible.
Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.
I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.
Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
