Quote

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

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
Book
Portraits
Hopeful
Remarkable
Fascinating
Endless
Brain
Human
Adaptability
Humans
Portrait

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

Image
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
Image
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
Music is part of being human.
Oliver Sacks
Image
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Oliver Sacks
Image
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Oliver Sacks
Image
With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity this does not happen with imagination.
Oliver Sacks
Image
Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.
Oliver Sacks
Image
I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
Oliver Sacks
Image
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
Oliver Sacks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved I have been given much and I have given something in return I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Oliver Sacks
Image
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
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
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
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