Top 100 Oliver Sacks Quotes
#1. The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you're working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset
Daniel J. Levitin
#2. For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.
Francis Collins
#3. Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
Atul Gawande
#4. There is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation. - OLIVER SACKS
Maia Szalavitz
#5. I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life." Oliver Sacks
Bill Hayes
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.
Oliver Sacks
#9. He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.
Oliver Sacks
#10. He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense; it was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin.
Oliver Sacks
#11. 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
#12. In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.
Oliver Sacks
#13. 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
#14. As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?' - and
Oliver Sacks
#15. 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
#16. Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One
Oliver Sacks
#17. 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
#18. All the trouble starts when people forget they're human.
Oliver Sacks
#19. I never took amphetamines again - despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).
Oliver Sacks
#20. 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
#21. Far commoner, and perhaps the most intolerable of all aura symptoms, is intense sudden vertigo accompanied by staggering, overwhelming nausea, and frequently vomiting. The
Oliver Sacks
#22. It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Oliver Sacks
#23. Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).
Oliver Sacks
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.
Oliver Sacks
#28. 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
#29. I cannot pretend i am not without fear ...
Oliver Sacks
#30. 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
#31. Astounded - and indifferent - for he was a man who, in effect, had no 'day before'.
Oliver Sacks
#32. The delirious visions when they came to him may have owed something to opium as well as to a high temperature, since opium was then a normal remedy for ague or malaria.
Oliver Sacks
#33. We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.
Oliver Sacks
#34. And I myself was wrung with emotion
it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his life lost in limbo, dissolving.
Oliver Sacks
#35. But after my fall and my near death, fear and caution
Oliver Sacks
#36. We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a "third world" of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?
Oliver Sacks
#37. 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
#38. The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace
Oliver Sacks
#39. Experience and experiment are crucially important here - neural Darwinism is essentially experiential selection. The
Oliver Sacks
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. In the mid-1950s, when I was in medical school, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between our neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders.
Oliver Sacks
#44. We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
Oliver Sacks
#45. When I told my mother about them, she said she had similar attacks, and that they did no harm and lasted only a few minutes. With this, I started to look forward to my occasional attacks, wondering what might happen in the next one
Oliver Sacks
#46. Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. - Kierkegaard
Oliver Sacks
#47. What an odd thing it is to see an entire species
billions of people
playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (
The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)
Oliver Sacks
#48. 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
#49. In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:
Oliver Sacks
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.
Oliver Sacks
#54. 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
#55. Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
Oliver Sacks
#56. Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.
Oliver Sacks
#57. Parked the bike in a side road - and fainted. The second accident occurred at night in heavy
Oliver Sacks
#58. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.
Oliver Sacks
#59. 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
#60. We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Oliver Sacks
#61. I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
Oliver Sacks
#62. Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity - manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly
Oliver Sacks
#63. 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
#64. Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.
Oliver Sacks
#65. Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth - it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.
Oliver Sacks
#66. many cardinal characteristics of migraine aura, in its visual (scotomatous), tactile (paraesthetic) and aphasic forms. We
Oliver Sacks
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.
Oliver Sacks
#71. I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas - like religion and politics - where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.
Oliver Sacks
#72. Travel now by all means - if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.
Oliver Sacks
#73. I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.
Oliver Sacks
#74. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
Oliver Sacks
#75. The "mare" in "nightmare" originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called "Old Hag" in Newfoundland).
Oliver Sacks
#77. 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
#78. I had returned to piano-playing and music lessons when I had turned seventy-five (having written about how even older people can learn new skills, I thought it was time to take my own advice).
Oliver Sacks
#79. When the brain is released from the constraints of reality, it can generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and "impossible" combinations".
Oliver Sacks
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
Oliver Sacks
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people ... I feel the future is in good hands.
Oliver Sacks
#86. Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
Oliver Sacks
#87. 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
#88. fossilised" dream-sequences preserved as such in the cortex, precise replicas of past experience; they appear to be mnemic images which unfold, given the initial activation (epileptic, migrainous, experimental, etc.) at the same rate as the initial perceptual experience.
Oliver Sacks
#89. 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
#90. What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.
Oliver Sacks
#91. The power of music to integrate and cure ... is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
Oliver Sacks
#92. Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Oliver Sacks
#93. And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.
Oliver Sacks
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a "narrative" and is defined by this narrative.
Oliver Sacks
#97. 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
#98. When the attack is "due" (or a little overdue), it will occur, explosively, whether or not there is any provocation.
Oliver Sacks
#99. Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.
Oliver Sacks
#100. 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
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