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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

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Oliver Sacks
Age: 82 †
Born: 1933
Born: July 9
Died: 2015
Died: August 30
Chemist
Neurologist
Physician Writer
Science Communicator
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Oliver Wolf Sacks
Feel
Feels
Work
Love
Freud
Purpose
Words
Sense
Wanted

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

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It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
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Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.
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I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
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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.
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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.
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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
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In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.
Oliver Sacks
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We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded ... unconscious, automatic.
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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.
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Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
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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
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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
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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
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I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
Oliver Sacks
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Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what other people have.
Oliver Sacks
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Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
Oliver Sacks
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I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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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
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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