Top 200 Oliver Sacks Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.”

— Oliver Sacks

Featured in: Medicine Quotes

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Oliver Sacks

5. “Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.”

— Oliver Sacks

6. “Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.”

— Oliver Sacks

7. “We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.”

— Oliver Sacks

8. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

9. “Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

Featured in: Reading Quotes

11. “Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it’s memory.”

— Oliver Sacks

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Music has a bonding power, it’s primal social cement.”

— Oliver Sacks

15. “The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.”

— Oliver Sacks

16. “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.”

— Oliver Sacks

17. “Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.”

— Oliver Sacks

18. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

19. “Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

— Oliver Sacks

20. “There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.”

— Oliver Sacks

21. “Music is part of being human.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

23. “Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives – we are each of us unique.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

25. “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

26. “In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

28. “The structure of chaos is not static but dynamic;.”

— Oliver Sacks

29. “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

30. “We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.”

— Oliver Sacks

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” – Kierkegaard.”

— Oliver Sacks

32. “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

33. “Eccentricity is like having an accent. It’s what “other” people have.”

— Oliver Sacks

34. “Perception is never purely in the present – it has to draw on experience of the past.”

— Oliver Sacks

35. “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

36. “Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.”

— Oliver Sacks

37. “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

38. “Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

40. “All the trouble starts when people forget they’re human.”

— Oliver Sacks

41. “The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.”

— Oliver Sacks

42. “I appreciated that all animals have some form of mental life that reflects the architecture of their nervous system.”

— Oliver Sacks

43. “Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of “thinking in pure meanings.” I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth – it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.”

— Oliver Sacks

44. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

46. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

47. “Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.”

— Oliver Sacks

48. “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

49. “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

50. “Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.”

— Oliver Sacks