The Best Oliver Sacks quotes

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

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

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 they’re not. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

I rejoice when I meet gifted young people… I feel the future is in good hands. — Oliver Sacks

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever ‘completing a life’ means. — 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’. — Oliver Sacks

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

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.’–Kierkegaard — Oliver Sacks

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. — Oliver Sacks

The brain is The most intricate mechanism in The universe, i couldn’t imagine spending my life with kidneys. — Oliver Sacks

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

I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life–achieving a sense of peace within oneself. — 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. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain. — Oliver Sacks

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. — Oliver Sacks

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

When the brain is released from the constraints of reality, it can generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and ‘impossible’ combinations’. — Oliver Sacks

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

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads. — Oliver Sacks

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

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication. — Oliver Sacks

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

Music is part of being human. — Oliver Sacks

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. — Oliver Sacks

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

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

Music is…a fundamental way of expressing our humanity–and it is often our best medicine. — 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. — Oliver Sacks

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people. — Oliver Sacks

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it’s memory. — Oliver Sacks