Oliver Sacks

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

— Oliver Sacks

“All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.”

— Oliver Sacks

“For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing -…

— Oliver Sacks

To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner…

— Oliver Sacks

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can…

— Oliver Sacks

“Indeed, she seemed to have a special role as a wise woman, a woman whose robust common sense and humor had been…

— Oliver Sacks

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the…

— Oliver Sacks

“And I myself was wrung with emotion -- it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his…

— Oliver Sacks

My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

— Oliver Sacks

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling,…

— Oliver Sacks

“To what extent are we the authors, the creators of our own experiences? How much are these predetermined by the brains or…

— Oliver Sacks

“But who was more tragic, or who was more damned—the man who knew it, or the man who did not?”

— Oliver Sacks

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally…

— Oliver Sacks

“What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal…

— Oliver Sacks

“I appreciated that all animals have some form of mental life that reflects the architecture of their nervous system.”

— Oliver Sacks

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and…

— Oliver Sacks

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

— Oliver Sacks

I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from…

— Oliver Sacks

“Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals—aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and…

— Oliver Sacks

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

— Oliver Sacks

“And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous,…

— Oliver Sacks

Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts…

— Oliver Sacks

“It is often felt that Darwin, more than anyone, banished “meaning” from the world—in the sense of any overall divine meaning or…

— Oliver Sacks

I cannot pretend i am not without fear…

— Oliver Sacks

Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned…

— Oliver Sacks