Oliver Sacks Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Health is infinite and expansive in mode, and reaches out to be filled with the fullness of the world; whereas disease is finite and reductive in mode, and endeavors to reduce the world to itself.

Oliver Sacks