Oliver Sacks famous quotes

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

#Months

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Fate #Unique #People

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

#Gratitude #Feelings #Wonder

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Beautiful #Adventure #Thinking

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

#Memories #Imagination #Perception

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Real #Unique #Men

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

#Mean #Trying #Should

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

#Communication #Thinking #People

Music is part of being human.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Musical #Being Human #Music Is

A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Mean #Loss #Identity

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

#Creativity #Mind #Depth

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Our World #Interesting #Perspective

The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Unique #Miracle #Survival

Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Eye #Principles #Language

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

#Life #Gains #Disease

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

#Music #Fundamentals #Integrating

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

#Dying #Faces

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Eye #Men #Self

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

#Musical #Brain #Hearing

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

#Way #Productive

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Gratitude #Feelings #Special

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

#Life #Stories #Existence

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Depression #Moving #Luxury

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Creating #Brain #Orchestra

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Song #Children #Musical

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

#Memories #Emotion #Evoke

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Art #Unique #Emotional

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

#Memories #Mind #Arise

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

#Passion #Men #Enthusiasm

To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Drama #Men #Self

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

#Hands #People #Young

Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Unique #Narrative #Different

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality
-- Oliver Sacks

#Dream #Reality #Waking

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

#Medicine #Patient #Cardinals

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

#Perspective #Focus #Feels

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

#Eye #Imagination #Brain

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Children #Stories #Demand

there  are  other  senses  -­  secret  senses,  sixth  senses,  if  you  will  -­  equally  vital,  but  unrecognized,  and  unlauded.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Secret #Sixth Sense

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Imagination #Perception #Brain

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)
-- Oliver Sacks

#Years #Two Year Olds #People

I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Fall #Night #Thinking

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

#Numbers #Boyhood #Elements

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Lying #Expression #Feelings

Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Blood #Practice #Long

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.
-- Oliver Sacks

#People #Brain #Awful

I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
-- Oliver Sacks

#School #Boys #Class

I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Unique #Tools

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

#Design #Evolution #Blunders

Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to do with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a substance, or the way it was transformed in chemical reactions, never forgot anything he read, or was told, about the phenomena of chemistry. He seemed indifferent, or inattentive, to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena-noticing everything, forgetting nothing-that constituted Scheele's special strength.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Passion #Smell #Special

Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Strong #Passion #Animal

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
-- Oliver Sacks

#Fighting #Men #Differences

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Gold #Sodium #Elements

We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded ... unconscious, automatic.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Secret #Vision #World

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Moving #Orange #Tears

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Memories #Men #Profound

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

#Degrees #Odd

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
-- Oliver Sacks

#World #Favorites Things #Salmon

Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Brain #Addresses #Hallucinations

I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'
-- Oliver Sacks

#Atheist #Marijuana #Thinking

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

#Realizing #Life Is #Feels

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

#And Love #Purpose #Feels

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Memories #Musical #Brain

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

#Blessing #Grace #Stealing

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Sound #Example #Digital

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

#Men #Indifferent

If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Medicine #Physicians #Common

Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
-- Oliver Sacks

#Reflection #Museums #Drs

Muscular dystrophy ... was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: 'How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how is it that it is recognised only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?'
-- Oliver Sacks

#Eye #Disease #Chess

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

#Social #Bonding #Cement

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

#Book #Hopeful #Brain

If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Nice #Blessed #Heart

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

#Feelings #Irony #Paradox

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

#Profound #Brain #Intriguing

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Art #Emotional #Abstract

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Mean #Community #Culture

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

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Science

I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Health #Delight #Patient

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Art #Civilization #Different

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

#Doctors #Stupidity #Patient

It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love; it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Kindness #Heart #Adversity

I cannot pretend i am not without fear…
-- Oliver Sacks

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

#Firsts #Patient #Sickness

For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Health #People #Feelings

... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Body #Certainty #Bases

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Monday #Zoos #First Love

Enhancement not only allows the possibilities of a healthy fullness and exuberance, but of a rather ominous extravagance, aberration, monstrosity ... This danger is built into the very nature of growth and life. Growth can become over-growth, life 'hyper-life' ... The paradox of an illness which can present as wellness - as a wonderful feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its malignant potentials - is one of the chimaeras, tricks and ironies of nature.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Health #Feelings #Growth

Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Rivers #Smell #Lakes

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [...] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
-- Oliver Sacks

#Dream #Memories #Confused