To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to… — Oliver Sacks Copy Share 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;… — 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
