Oliver Sacks Quotes

78 quotes in 1183 categories

• We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
• A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace…
• Scheele, it was said, never forgot anything if it had to do with chemistry. He never forgot the look, the feel, the smell of a…
• Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
• The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
• It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
• When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
• I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to…
• About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
• Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You…
• I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling.…
• Muscular dystrophy ... was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been…
• We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
• If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked…
• There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
• I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
• People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite…
• Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
• It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
• There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they…

Browse Oliver Sacks Quotes by Category