Quote

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement

Oliver Sacks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Social
Power
Music
Bonding
Cement
Primal

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

Image
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.
Oliver Sacks
Image
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
Oliver Sacks
Image
Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
Oliver Sacks
Image
The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's. But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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.
Oliver Sacks
Image
I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
Oliver Sacks