Oliver Sacks

“what sort of a life (if any), what sort of a world, what sort of a self, can be preserved in a…

— Oliver Sacks

he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and…

— Oliver Sacks

Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.

— Oliver Sacks

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it,…

— Oliver Sacks

there are other senses -­ secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -­ equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.

— Oliver Sacks

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.

— Oliver Sacks

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

— Oliver Sacks

Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all…

— Oliver Sacks

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if…

— Oliver Sacks

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie…

— Oliver Sacks

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable…

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

“And language, (...) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what…

— Oliver Sacks

“In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a…

— Oliver Sacks

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement…

— Oliver Sacks

“While some of these near-death experiences are marked by a sense of helplessness and passivity, even dissociation, in others there is an…

— Oliver Sacks

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an…

— Oliver Sacks

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

— Oliver Sacks

“My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might…

— Oliver Sacks

“judgment is the most important faculty we have. An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but…

— Oliver Sacks

Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from…

— Oliver Sacks

I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses.…

— Oliver Sacks

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and…

— Oliver Sacks

The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor…

— Oliver Sacks

“This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a…

— Oliver Sacks