"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 W. Sacks

"My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me. "
— Oliver W. Sacks

"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 W. Sacks

"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 W. Sacks

"Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality"
— Oliver W. 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 W. Sacks

"Music is part of being human."
— Oliver W. Sacks (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain)

"Music is part of being human."
— Oliver W. Sacks (Musicophilia)