Oliver Sacks Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Oliver Sacks
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
When I was fourteen or fifteen […] the Yom Kippur service ended in an unforgettable way, for Schechter, who always put great effort into the blowing of the shofar—he would go red in the face with exertion—produced a long, seemingly endless note of unearthly beauty, and then dropped dead before us on the bema, the raised platform where he would sing. I had the feeling that God had killed Schechter, sent a thunderbolt, stricken him. The shock of this for everyone was tempered by the reflection that if there was ever a moment in which a soul was pure, forgiven, relieved of all sin, it was at this moment, when the shofar was blown in conclusion of the fast […].

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

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
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
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
Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

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
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
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach. (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)

Oliver Sacks
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
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
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
Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.

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

Oliver Sacks
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