Top 100 Oliver Sacks Quotes
#1. Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
Oliver Sacks
#2. I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday - a special bottle that could neither leak nor break - he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, "I take a little every morning for my health.
Oliver Sacks
#3. He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin.
Oliver Sacks
#4. 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
#5. In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.
Oliver Sacks
#6. He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call 'The Great Health' - rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette's.
Oliver Sacks
#7. Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.
Oliver Sacks
#8. I wondered if what one normally calls "normal" was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emergent from the dark night and abyss, there was an intoxication of light and love and health.
Oliver Sacks
#9. All the trouble starts when people forget they're human.
Oliver Sacks
#10. The drowsiness which often accompanies or precedes a severe common migraine is occasionally abstracted as a symptom in its own right, and may then constitute the sole expression of the migrainous tendency. The
Oliver Sacks
#11. It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Oliver Sacks
#12. It was perhaps fortunate that I chanced to see Rebecca in her so-different modes -- so damaged and incorrigible in the one, so full of promise and potential in the other -- and that she was on of the first patients I saw in our clinic. For what I saw in her, what she showed me, I now saw in all.
Oliver Sacks
#13. After a while the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It
Oliver Sacks
#14. 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
#15. We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.
Oliver Sacks
#16. But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution
Oliver Sacks
#17. We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?
Oliver Sacks
#18. Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, chorea, or dystonia.
Oliver Sacks
#19. The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace
Oliver Sacks
#20. It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.
Oliver Sacks
#21. Attacks characterised by little more than malaise are likely to be regarded as mild viral illnesses. Attacks characterised by alteration of affect and consciousness - mild drowsiness or depression - may be taken for purely emotional reactions. Both
Oliver Sacks
#23. Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. - Kierkegaard
Oliver Sacks
#24. Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal). No
Oliver Sacks
#25. 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
#26. It was backbreaking, round-the-clock work, and it made us realize how hard the nurses and aides and orderlies worked in their normal routines, but we managed to prevent skin breakdown or any other problems among the more than five hundred patients. Work
Oliver Sacks
#27. Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.
Oliver Sacks
#28. I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.
Oliver Sacks
#29. We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Oliver Sacks
#30. I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
Oliver Sacks
#31. 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
#32. Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
Oliver Sacks
#33. many cardinal characteristics of migraine aura, in its visual (scotomatous), tactile (paraesthetic) and aphasic forms. We
Oliver Sacks
#35. 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
#36. These were "fossil behaviors," Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now "awakened" by L-dopa.1 I
Oliver Sacks
#37. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
Oliver Sacks
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them ... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit.
Oliver Sacks
#41. By what warrant, therefore, is such an attack to be termed an extended epilepsy rather than a quite brief and severe, let us say, a condensed migraine?
Oliver Sacks
#42. 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
#43. Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Oliver Sacks
#44. This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the "civilized" world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.
Oliver Sacks
#45. Ucho w liczbach: A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.
Oliver Sacks
#46. patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost 'abstract' and 'propositional' thought - and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia).
Oliver Sacks
#47. It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by "lysis," a gradual abatement of the suffering accompanied by one or more secretory activities. As
Oliver Sacks
#48. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
Oliver Sacks
#50. A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.
Oliver Sacks
#51. There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.
Oliver Sacks
#52. I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.
Oliver Sacks
#53. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
Oliver Sacks
#54. First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.
Oliver Sacks
#55. I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech would have been absurd. It seemed the very summit of the world.
Oliver Sacks
#56. The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.
Oliver Sacks
#57. 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
#58. Thus higher-order memorization is a multistage process, involving the transfer of perceptions, or perceptual syntheses, from short-term to long-term memory. It is just such a transfer that fails to occur in people with temporal lobe damage.
Oliver Sacks
#59. 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
#60. Henry VIII in full armor, it was said, weighed 500 pounds.
Oliver Sacks
#61. 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
#62. WHILE MUSIC alone can unlock people with parkinsonism, and movement or exercise of any kind is also beneficial, an ideal combination of music and movement is provided by dance (and dancing with a partner, or in a social setting, brings to bear other therapeutic dimensions).
Oliver Sacks
#63. Entered my life and have been with me, for better or worse, ever since. A carefree life became a careful one, to some extent. I felt this was the end of youth and that middle age was now upon me.
Oliver Sacks
#64. And go to San Francisco! It's one of the twelve most interesting cities in the world. California has immense contrasts - the utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there's beauty and interest everywhere.
Oliver Sacks
#65. A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.
Oliver Sacks
#66. I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world.
There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.
Oliver Sacks
#67. 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
#68. Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement
Oliver Sacks
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
Oliver Sacks
#72. I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
Oliver Sacks
#73. The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.
Oliver Sacks
#74. 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
#75. He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, "I no longer believe what I was about to say.")
Oliver Sacks
#76. His closed-eye appearances had deceived many visitors, I was told, but they might then find, to their cost, that these closed eyes veiled the sharpest attention, the clearest and deepest mind, they were ever likely to encounter. On
Oliver Sacks
#77. Dangerously well' - what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling 'too well
Oliver Sacks
#78. There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
Oliver Sacks
#79. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without 'abstract attitude' but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind -
Oliver Sacks
#80. The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.
Oliver Sacks
#81. I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life - achieving a sense of peace within oneself.
Oliver Sacks
#82. Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past;( ... ).We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recalled and admixed with every new perception.
Oliver Sacks
#83. At 11, I could say 'I am sodium' (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
Oliver Sacks
#84. 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
#85. But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.
Oliver Sacks
#86. When traditional figures - devils, witches, or hags - are no longer believed in, new ones - aliens, visitations from "a previous life" - take their place. Hallucinations,
Oliver Sacks
#87. The left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialized, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.
Oliver Sacks
#88. ...too-muchness had no doubt been noticed at school, for it was around this time that I received a school report that said, 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.
Oliver Sacks
#89. Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
Oliver Sacks
#90. 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
#91. He is man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.
Oliver Sacks
#92. 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
#93. [...] the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the 'other,' the 'presence,' becomes the person of God.
Oliver Sacks
#94. 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
#95. Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.
Oliver Sacks
#96. Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,
Oliver Sacks
#97. (One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as "cognitively infectious musical agents.")
Oliver Sacks
#98. 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
#99. I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz's phrase) thick description.
Oliver Sacks
#100. This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or
Oliver Sacks
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