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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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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
Means
Feel
Feels
Mean
Trying
Life
Completing
Complete
Whatever

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

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Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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Music is part of being human.
Oliver Sacks
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I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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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
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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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Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
Oliver Sacks
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It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
Oliver Sacks
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I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
Oliver Sacks
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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
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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
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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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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
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Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
Oliver Sacks
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Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what other people have.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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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.
Oliver Sacks