Top 35 Iain McGilchrist Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “On the left hemisphere of the brain: ‘Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything.”

— Iain McGilchrist

2. “Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.”

— Iain McGilchrist

3. “Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.”

— Iain McGilchrist

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

— Iain McGilchrist

5. “We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.”

— Iain McGilchrist

6. “Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and.”

— Iain McGilchrist

7. “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: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.”

— Iain McGilchrist

8. “The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist.”

— Iain McGilchrist

9. “It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves.”

— Iain McGilchrist

10. “An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”

— Iain McGilchrist

11. “Through these assaults of the left hemisphere on the body, spirituality and art, essentially mocking, discounting or dismantling what it does not understand and cannot use, we are at risk of becoming trapped in the I–it world, with all the exits through which we might rediscover the I–thou world being progressively blocked off.”

— Iain McGilchrist

12. “The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.”

— Iain McGilchrist

13. “What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”

— Iain McGilchrist

14. “If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’377.”

— Iain McGilchrist

15. “There is always a model by which we are understanding, an exemplar with which we are comparing, what we see, and where it is not identified it usually means that we have tacitly adopted the model of the machine.”

— Iain McGilchrist

16. “Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time.”

— Iain McGilchrist

17. “Of course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.”

— Iain McGilchrist

18. “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

19. “There are, it seems to me, four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination.”

— Iain McGilchrist

20. “Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”

— Iain McGilchrist

21. “There are, it seems to me, four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination. I also believe strongly that any world view that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail. Each on its own has its virtues and its vices, its gifts and its inherent dangers: only by respecting each and all together can we learn to act wisely.”

— Iain McGilchrist

22. “Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out – just that. Without purpose.”

— Iain McGilchrist

23. “Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ’we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’13 We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.”

— Iain McGilchrist

24. “If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise.”

— Iain McGilchrist

25. “Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world.”

— Iain McGilchrist

26. “When it is presented with evidence that what it is doing is not working, its invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it: because that’s what its theory dictates, and for the left hemisphere theory trumps reality.”

— Iain McGilchrist

27. “We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.”

— Iain McGilchrist

28. “The cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it.”

— Iain McGilchrist

29. “Ever more narrowly focussed attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information, and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience. Knowledge, in its turn, would seem more ‘real’ than what one might call wisdom, which would seem too nebulous, something never to be grasped.”

— Iain McGilchrist

30. “My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”

— Iain McGilchrist

31. “First, the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’.”

— Iain McGilchrist

32. “According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

— Iain McGilchrist

33. “The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively.”

— Iain McGilchrist

34. “Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know – only release something in us that is already there.”

— Iain McGilchrist

35. “No single truth does not mean no truth.”

— Iain McGilchrist

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

— Iain McGilchrist

37. “We don’t need a lot more quick fixes. We need a change in the paradigm.”

— Iain McGilchrist

38. “These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.”

— Iain McGilchrist

39. “Nietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler’.”

— Iain McGilchrist