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When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
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
Five
Things
Smoked
World
Bach
Salmon
Answered
Favorite
Asked
Told
More quotes by Oliver Sacks
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
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 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
I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
Oliver Sacks
Music is part of being human.
Oliver Sacks
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
Oliver Sacks
Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)
Oliver Sacks
Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
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
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
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
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Oliver Sacks
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
Oliver Sacks
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
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
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
If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.
Oliver Sacks
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
For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.
Oliver Sacks
I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
Oliver Sacks