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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
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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
May
Mere
Organisms
Mean
Disease
Preserve
Always
However
Reaction
Never
Loss
Excess
Strange
Preserves
Compensate
Individual
Reactions
Organism
Means
Psychological
Restore
Part
Identity
Replace
More quotes by Oliver Sacks
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly it needs no mediation.
Oliver Sacks
... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty.
Oliver Sacks
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Oliver Sacks
It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity.
Oliver Sacks
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
Oliver Sacks
Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
Oliver Sacks
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
Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement
Oliver Sacks
To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
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
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
The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. ... We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music.
Oliver Sacks
Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Oliver Sacks
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it.
Oliver Sacks
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
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
There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as tick-tock, tick-tock - even though it is actually tick tick, tick tick.
Oliver Sacks
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Oliver Sacks
Music is part of being human.
Oliver Sacks
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
Oliver Sacks
