Top 200 Oliver Sacks Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty. But it does not have to have any ‘meaning’ whatever. One may recall music, give it the life of imagination simply because one likes it – this is reason enough. Or perhaps there may be no reason at all, as Rodolfo Llinas points out.”

— Oliver Sacks

152. “The left hemisphere is more sophisticated and specialized, a very late outgrowth of the primate, and especially the hominid, brain. On the other hand, it is the right hemisphere which controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.”

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

155. “When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far,” and this was often the case.”

— Oliver Sacks

156. “Culture is as crucial as Nature.”

— Oliver Sacks

157. “God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.”

— Oliver Sacks

158. “I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.”

— Oliver Sacks

159. “Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative.”

— Oliver Sacks

160. “There are no files in my memory that are repressed,′ she asserted. ‘You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors – nothing is hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can’t bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn’t generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippocampus.”

— Oliver Sacks

161. “This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or.”

— Oliver Sacks

162. “I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.”

— Oliver Sacks

163. “Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.”

— Oliver Sacks

164. “What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.”

— Oliver Sacks

165. “To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.”

— Oliver Sacks

166. “Characteristic of such affective equivalents is their brevity – manic-depressive cycles, as generally understood, occupy several weeks, and frequently longer. Monthly.”

— Oliver Sacks

167. “I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways.”

— Oliver Sacks

168. “I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is “hardwired” or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain.”

— Oliver Sacks

169. “For ‘wellness’, naturally is no cause of complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of ‘wrongness’ or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being ‘very well’, they may become suspicious if they feel ‘too well’.”

— Oliver Sacks

170. “Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal...”

— Oliver Sacks

171. “Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.”

— Oliver Sacks

172. “Did being in love itself flood the body with opioids, or cannabinoids, or whatever?”

— Oliver Sacks

173. “This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self became nobody.”

— Oliver Sacks

174. “I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday – a special bottle that could neither leak nor break – he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”

— Oliver Sacks

175. “All of us, at first, had high hopes of helping Jammie – he was so personable, so likable, so quick and intelligent, it was difficult to believe that he might be beyond help. But none of us had ever encountered, 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

176. “I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech would have been absurd. It seemed the very summit of the world.”

— Oliver Sacks

177. “They were all, in a sense, amateurs – self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution – and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world.”

— Oliver Sacks

178. “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

179. “Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond’s words, “a general feeling of disorder,” which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient’s powers of description.”

— Oliver Sacks

180. “Ucho w liczbach:” A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.”

— Oliver Sacks

181. “In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature. Steve.”

— Oliver Sacks

182. “With neurology, if you go far enough with it, and you keep going, you end up getting weird. If you go a little further, you end up in the spirit.”

— Oliver Sacks

183. “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.”

— Oliver Sacks

184. “This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.”

— Oliver Sacks

185. “He said that he had learned Transcendental Meditation as a way of dealing with otherwise uncontrollable ticcing in public places.“It’s just autohypnosis,” he explained. “You have a mantra, a little word or phrase repeating slowly in your mind, and you soon get into a sort of trance and become oblivious to everything. It calms me down.” He remained almost tic-free for the rest of the evening.”

— Oliver Sacks

186. “McKenzie once called Parkinsonism “an organized chaos,” and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness of the first lies in its uncertainty, its flux; the nastiness of the second in its sense of immutable heavy permanence. Typically, indeed, treatment is only possible early, before migraine has “solidified” into immovable fixed forms.”

— Oliver Sacks

187. “Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.”

— Oliver Sacks

188. “I had been given not a remission, but an intermission, a time to deepen friendships, to see patients, to write, and to travel back to my homeland, England.”

— Oliver Sacks

189. “In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude – gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude too that I had been able to give something back.”

— Oliver Sacks

190. “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.”

— Oliver Sacks

191. “I am haunted by the density of reality.”

— Oliver Sacks

192. “I realize that if love were the cure, I would have been healed a long time ago.”

— Oliver Sacks

193. “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. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.”

— Oliver Sacks

194. “The drowsiness which often accompanies or precedes a severe common migraine is occasionally abstracted as a symptom in its own right, and may then constitute the sole expression of the migrainous tendency. The.”

— Oliver Sacks

195. “The hateful mood of a migraine – depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible – tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. “Resolution by secretion” thus resembles a catharsis on both physiological and psychological levels, like weeping for grief. The.”

— Oliver Sacks

196. “Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought’, independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.”

— Oliver Sacks

197. “Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One.”

— Oliver Sacks

198. “My father called swimming “the elixir of life,” and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.”

— Oliver Sacks

199. “The perverse need for illness – both in patients themselves, and sometimes in those who are close to them – must be a major determinant in causing relapses, the most insidious enemy of the will-to-get-better:.”

— Oliver Sacks

200. “The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.”

— Oliver Sacks