Top 200 Oliver Sacks Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Oliver Sacks

53. “Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.”

— Oliver Sacks

54. “My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. 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

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

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

57. “Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the world.”

— Oliver Sacks

58. “There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.”

— Oliver Sacks

59. “I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

61. “You have done useful, honorable work. Come home. All is forgiven.”

— Oliver Sacks

62. “When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.”

— Oliver Sacks

63. “Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.”

— Oliver Sacks

64. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

65. “One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world – to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.”

— Oliver Sacks

66. “Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.”

— Oliver Sacks

67. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

68. “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

69. “This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the “civilized” world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.”

— Oliver Sacks

70. “Visual illusions, too, fascinated me; they showed how intellectual understanding, insight, and even common sense were powerless against the force of perceptual distortions. Gibson’s inverting glasses showed the power of the mind to rectify optical distortions, where visual illusions showed its inability to correct perceptual ones.”

— Oliver Sacks

71. “I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.”

— Oliver Sacks

72. “Thinking of my schizophrenic brother, Michael, I asked Shengold if I too was schizophrenic. “No,” he answered. Was I then, I asked, “merely neurotic”? “No,” he answered. I left it there, we left it there, and there it has been left for the last forty-nine years. –.”

— Oliver Sacks

73. “He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.”

— Oliver Sacks

74. “Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together, and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”

— Oliver Sacks

75. “There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.”

— Oliver Sacks

76. “The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.”

— Oliver Sacks

77. “We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.”

— Oliver Sacks

78. “None of us had ever encountered, or even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”

— Oliver Sacks

79. “The old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery – half-appalled, half-amused – seeing for the first time exactly what is wrong and, in the same moment, exactly what there is to be done. This is the therapeutic moment.”

— Oliver Sacks

80. “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

— Oliver Sacks

81. “Embodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact.”

— Oliver Sacks

82. “Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.”

— Oliver Sacks

83. “We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative – whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.”

— Oliver Sacks

84. “The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity...”

— Oliver Sacks

85. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

87. “The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear – she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything – she tends to be treated as a phoney or a fool.”

— Oliver Sacks

88. “The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace –.”

— Oliver Sacks

89. “I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.”

— Oliver Sacks

90. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

91. “As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?’ – and.”

— Oliver Sacks

92. “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. 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

93. “For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing – and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”

— Oliver Sacks

94. “What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.”

— Oliver Sacks

95. “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 and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written.”

— Oliver Sacks

96. “My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they’re two or three? Chimpanzees don’t dance.”

— Oliver Sacks

97. “I feel glad to be alive – “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.”

— Oliver Sacks

98. “Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”

— Oliver Sacks

99. “I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, “Speed” and “In the River of Consciousness.”

— Oliver Sacks

100. “Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.”

— Oliver Sacks