Oliver Sacks quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Oliver Sacks on Wise Famous Quotes.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution

Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.

Music is part of being human.

It remains, for me, the most powerful and elegant explanation of how we humans and our brains construct our very individual selves and worlds.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

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.

[photography] ... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.

When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far," and this was often the case.

Music is ... a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist.

I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.

For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.

Pride and a Daily Marathon,

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

The Allegory of the Wolf Boy" ("At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity").

When the attack is "due" (or a little overdue), it will occur, explosively, whether or not there is any provocation.

About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.

In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning - a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy - was ignored or bypassed;

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

Culture is as crucial as Nature.

He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife's head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat!

First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.

I often dream ... of my parents and of my former patients - all long gone but loved and important in my life.

Now there is stillness - such a stillness as I have never heard before in all my life. Soon I shall start moving again, and perhaps I will never stop.

Astounded - and indifferent - for he was a man who, in effect, had no 'day before'.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace

He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

I feel glad to be alive - "I'm glad I'm not dead!" sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. - Kierkegaard

We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?

Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a "narrative" and is defined by this narrative.

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.

As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?' - and

Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.

He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

(One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as "cognitively infectious musical agents.")

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

I am haunted by the density of reality

I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.

We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.

My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.

Parked the bike in a side road - and fainted. The second accident occurred at night in heavy

Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One

The power of music to integrate and cure ... is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal ...

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.

I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.

Dangerously well' - what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling 'too well

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.

It also gave me a feeling of vulnerability and mortality which I had not really had before. In

Experience and experiment are crucially important here - neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The

What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement

All the trouble starts when people forget they're human.

He is man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.

many cardinal characteristics of migraine aura, in its visual (scotomatous), tactile (paraesthetic) and aphasic forms. We

Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

I cannot pretend i am not without fear ...

This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

At 11, I could say 'I am sodium' (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

Henry VIII in full armor, it was said, weighed 500 pounds.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

I did not seem to have any special project to animate me.

She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity..

An alcoholic has a personality change after a drink or two, but a drunk can drink as much as he wants. I'm a drunk.

I rejoice when I meet gifted young people ... I feel the future is in good hands.

He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.