Oliver Sacks > Quotes

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
― Oliver Sacks

“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: La Musique, Le Cerveau Et Nous

“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

“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

“Music is part of being human.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

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

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“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

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain...Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.”
― 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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“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

“Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“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, Seeing Voices

“One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel.

"There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly …”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“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, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“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, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

“Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it memory.”
― Oliver Sacks

“There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“تصاب الحيوانات بالمرض, و لكن الإنسان فقط يمرض جذرياً
animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“a quiet despair..!!”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“يمكن لطفل أن يتابع الكتاب المقدس قبل أن يتابع إقيلدس, ليس لأن الكتاب المقدس أبسط (يمكن قول العكس) بل لأنه مطروح بأسلوب رمزي و قصصي”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales

“judgment is the most important faculty we have. 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—yet it is ignored, or misinterpreted, by classical (computational) neurology. And if we wonder how such an absurdity can arise, we find it in the assumptions, or the evolution, of neurology itself.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales