Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design. — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient. — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it,… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“By asking why, by seeking meaning (not in any final sense, but in the immediate sense of use or purpose), Darwin found… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr P.’s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects… (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors-… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share 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… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share 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… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
