Patient Quotes by Oliver Sacks

“The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture…

— Oliver Sacks

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the…

— Oliver Sacks

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ears.

— Oliver Sacks

“We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there…

— Oliver Sacks

“But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a reaction,…

— Oliver Sacks

There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different…

— Oliver Sacks

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…

— Oliver Sacks

Who cared if there was really any Being to pray to? What mattered was the sense of giving thanks and praise, the feeling of…

— Oliver Sacks

“unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the…

— Oliver Sacks

“We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each…

— Oliver Sacks

I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity…

— 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.…

— Oliver Sacks

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge…

— Oliver Sacks

About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.

— Oliver Sacks

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…

— Oliver Sacks