Iain McGilchrist Quotes (Author of The Master and His Emissary)

“Skills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture. The atomistic nature of our individuality is made clear in Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek ambition for us each to be ‘famous for fifteen minutes’. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of se... See more

“Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly... See more

“we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language’s attempt to undermine our understanding.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world... See more

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to... See more

“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.”

― Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning