All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

— David Eagleman

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

— David Eagleman

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

— David Eagleman

As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.

— David Eagleman

As Tanzania put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.

— David Eagleman

As your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you. And because the physical stuff is constantly changing, we are too. We’re not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

— David Eagleman

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

— David Eagleman

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

— David Eagleman

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

— David Eagleman

Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes.

— David Eagleman