Oliver Sacks Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Oliver Sacks quote about:
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“It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.”
-- 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 -
“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.”
-- 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 -
“A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“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 -
“About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“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 -
“Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”
-- Oliver Sacks -
“I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.”
-- 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
