Oliver Sacks Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

Oliver Sacks
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Sacks
Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.

Oliver Sacks
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
We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic and myth.

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

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

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

Oliver Sacks
Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world's character.

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

Oliver Sacks
Thinking of all the malodorous sulfur compounds and the atrocious smell of selenium and tellurium compounds, I decided that these three elements formed an olfactory as well as a chemical category, and thought of them thereafter as the "stinkogens."

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

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
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