Top 200 Oliver Sacks Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’ – rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.”

— Oliver Sacks

103. “These then are tales of metamorphosis, brought about by neurological chance, but metamorphosis into alternative states of being, other forms of life, no less human for being so different.”

— Oliver Sacks

104. “Vygotsky has been described – not unjustly – as “the Mozart of psychology.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

106. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

107. “For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.”

— Oliver Sacks

108. “Many patients may confess that they feel “strange” or “confused” during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware of something the matter in addition to the scintillating scotoma, paraesthesiae, etc., something so unprecedented in their experience, so difficult to describe, that it is often avoided or omitted when speaking of their complaints. Great.”

— Oliver Sacks

109. “Neurology and psychology, curiously, though they talk of everything else, almost never talk of ‘judgment’ –.”

— Oliver Sacks

110. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.”

— Oliver Sacks

111. “Even worse, this sort of pain had an affective component all its own, which I found difficult to describe, a quality of agony, of anguish, of horror – words which still do not catch its essence. Neuralgic pain cannot be “embraced,” fought against, or accommodated. It crushes one into a quivering, almost mindless sort of pulp; all one’s powers of will, one’s very identity, disappear under the assault of such pain. I.”

— Oliver Sacks

112. “We may see very clearly how the wrong sound, or “anti-music,” is pathogenic and migrainogenic; while the right sound – proper music – is truly tranquillising, and immediately restores cerebral health. These effects are striking, and quite fundamental, and put one in mind of Novalis’s aphorism: “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

— Oliver Sacks

113. “My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.”

— Oliver Sacks

114. “We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a “third world” of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?”

— Oliver Sacks

115. “What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here – that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely.”

— Oliver Sacks

116. “It is often felt that Darwin, more than anyone, banished “meaning” from the world – in the sense of any overall divine meaning or purpose. There is indeed no design, no plan, no blueprint in Darwin’s world; natural selection has no direction or aim, nor any goal to which it strives. Darwinism, it is often said, spelled the end of teleological thinking.”

— Oliver Sacks

117. “I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit.”

— Oliver Sacks

118. “That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning – a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy – was ignored or bypassed;.”

— Oliver Sacks

119. “At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.”

— Oliver Sacks

120. “Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.”

— Oliver Sacks

121. “Far commoner, and perhaps the most intolerable of all aura symptoms, is intense sudden vertigo accompanied by staggering, overwhelming nausea, and frequently vomiting. The.”

— Oliver Sacks

122. “The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech, aphasia, consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.”

— Oliver Sacks

123. “The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain... Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”

— Oliver Sacks

124. “Travel now by all means – if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.”

— Oliver Sacks

125. “An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind –.”

— Oliver Sacks

126. “When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.”

— Oliver Sacks

127. “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.”

— Oliver Sacks

128. “I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong – very strong – with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.”

— Oliver Sacks

129. “Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette’s syndrome, chorea, or dystonia.”

— Oliver Sacks

130. “It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by “lysis,” a gradual abatement of the suffering accompanied by one or more secretory activities. As.”

— Oliver Sacks

131. “I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight.”

— Oliver Sacks

132. “Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I’m concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.”

— Oliver Sacks

133. “The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. – Alvaro Pascual-Leone.”

— Oliver Sacks

134. “Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer – everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well – and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also.”

— Oliver Sacks

135. “And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”

— Oliver Sacks

136. “For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.”

— Oliver Sacks

137. “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.”

— Oliver Sacks

138. “A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.”

— Oliver Sacks

139. “Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger’s not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs.”

— Oliver Sacks

140. “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”

— Oliver Sacks

141. “The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.”

— Oliver Sacks

142. “The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.”

— Oliver Sacks

143. “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”

— Oliver Sacks

144. “Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.”

— Oliver Sacks

145. “The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he suddenly raised himself up on an elbow, said, “I’m going outside to have a smoke,” and fell back dead.”

— Oliver Sacks

146. “We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?”

— Oliver Sacks

147. “I often dream... of my parents and of my former patients – all long gone but loved and important in my life.”

— Oliver Sacks

148. “Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.”

— Oliver Sacks

149. “And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.”

— Oliver Sacks

150. “If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoievski in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as ‘portals’ to the beyond or the unknown?”

— Oliver Sacks