Quotes by Oliver Sacks

About Oliver Sacks:

Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He was widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders. Some of his books have been adapted for film and stage.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe. -DONNE

Oliver Sacks

I feel the most alive when I write.

Oliver Sacks

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and...

Oliver Sacks

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our per...

Oliver Sacks

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

Oliver Sacks

In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang fal...

Oliver Sacks

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely ...

Oliver Sacks

I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit.

Oliver Sacks

For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or dan...

Oliver Sacks

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who w...

Oliver Sacks

Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.

Oliver Sacks

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though ...

Oliver Sacks

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; it...

Oliver Sacks

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--

Oliver Sacks

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Chi...

Oliver Sacks

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain nee...

Oliver Sacks

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attra...

Oliver Sacks

The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone

Oliver Sacks

At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and th...

Oliver Sacks

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

Oliver Sacks

Author Bio

  • NameOliver Sacks
  • Descriptionphysician, author
  • AliasesOliver Wolf Sacks
  • BornJuly 9, 1933
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Chemist; Neuroscientist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; George Polk Award