Oliver Sacks Quotes

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

But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution — Oliver Sacks

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

Music is part of being human. — Oliver Sacks

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

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. — Oliver Sacks

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. — Oliver Sacks

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

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. — Oliver Sacks

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

Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

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

Pride and a Daily Marathon, — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

There is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation. - OLIVER SACKS — Maia Szalavitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Oliver Sacks

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.. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot pretend i am not without fear ... — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

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! — Oliver Sacks

Culture is as crucial as Nature. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"). — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times. — Oliver Sacks

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

I am haunted by the density of reality — Oliver Sacks

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

I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life." Oliver Sacks — Bill Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Oliver Sacks

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