Best 137 quotes of Oliver Sacks on MyQuotes

Oliver Sacks

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    Oliver Sacks

    About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger.

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    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.

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    Oliver Sacks

    A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

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    Oliver Sacks

    At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    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?

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    Oliver Sacks

    Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

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    Oliver 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.

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    Oliver 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

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    Oliver Sacks

    Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    Oliver Sacks

    Enhancement not only allows the possibilities of a healthy fullness and exuberance, but of a rather ominous extravagance, aberration, monstrosity ... This danger is built into the very nature of growth and life. Growth can become over-growth, life 'hyper-life' ... The paradox of an illness which can present as wellness - as a wonderful feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its malignant potentials - is one of the chimaeras, tricks and ironies of nature.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

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    Oliver Sacks

    First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.

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    Oliver Sacks

    For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.

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    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.

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    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'.

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    Oliver Sacks

    Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Oliver Sacks

    If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    Oliver Sacks

    In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.

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    Oliver Sacks

    In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

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    Oliver Sacks

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

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    Oliver Sacks

    I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

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    Oliver Sacks

    I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.

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    Oliver Sacks

    It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love; it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity.

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    Oliver Sacks

    It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.