108+ Oliver Sacks Quotes On Music, Dying And Exploratory

Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist and writer. He is best known for his books on neurology, which have been adapted into several films and stage plays. He wrote extensively on his patients' unusual medical conditions and the human experience of neurological and physical disorders. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Oliver Sacks on love, music, dying.

Top 10 Oliver Sacks Quotes

1. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
2. The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.
3. In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
4. 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 as rich and interesting and full as our world.
5. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
6. I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
7. There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
8. I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
9. Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.
10. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

Oliver Sacks Short Quotes

• Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
• I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
• I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
• I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
• I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
• We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
• Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.
• First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.
• Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
• At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Oliver Sacks Quotes About Love

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

Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music. — Oliver Sacks

It is easy to recollect the good things of life, the times when one's heart rejoices and expands, when everything is enfolded in kindness and love; it is easy to recollect the fineness of life-how noble one was, how generous one felt, what courage one showed in the face of adversity. — Oliver Sacks

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love. — 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 Love'. — Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes About Music

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 needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing. — Oliver Sacks

Music is part of being human. — Oliver Sacks

There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony. — Oliver Sacks

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement — Oliver Sacks

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity. — Oliver Sacks

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory. — Oliver Sacks

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 organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged. — Oliver Sacks

It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music. — Oliver Sacks

The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement. — Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes About Brain

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 interact with them. — Oliver Sacks

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain. — 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 of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions. — Oliver Sacks

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people. — Oliver Sacks

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination. — Oliver Sacks

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain. — 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

About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations. — Oliver Sacks

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not. — Oliver Sacks

Although I think it is wonderful to have the whole world of music available in something that small and to have it conveyed with such fidelity almost straight into the brain, I think the technology is also a danger. — Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. — Oliver Sacks

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity. — Oliver Sacks

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. — Oliver Sacks

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 or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be. — Oliver Sacks

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else. — Oliver Sacks

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. — Oliver Sacks

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 at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to. — Oliver Sacks

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. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.' — Oliver Sacks

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. — Oliver Sacks

The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease. — Oliver Sacks

If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world. — Oliver Sacks

I think the brain is a dynamic system in which some parts control or suppress other parts. And if perhaps one has damage in one of the controlling or suppressing areas, then you may have the emergence or eruption of something, whether it is a seizure, a criminal trait - - or even a sudden musical passion. — 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 that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug. — Oliver Sacks

We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded ... unconscious, automatic. — Oliver Sacks

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they're two or three? Chimpanzees don't dance. — 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. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do. — 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 was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not? — Oliver Sacks

I think there are dozens or hundreds of different forms of creativity. Pondering science and math problems for years is different from improvising jazz. Something which seems to me remarkable is how unconscious the creative process is. You encounter a problem, but can't solve it. — Oliver Sacks

If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy. — Oliver Sacks

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach. — 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 anarchy) — Oliver Sacks

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life. — Oliver Sacks

The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's. But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients. — Oliver Sacks

Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too. — 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 it is actually "tick tick, tick tick. — 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

I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it. — Oliver Sacks

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 of musical species. — Oliver Sacks

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable. — Oliver Sacks

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

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well — Oliver Sacks

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement. — Oliver Sacks

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. — 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 drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self. — Oliver Sacks

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads. — Oliver Sacks

Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye. — Oliver Sacks

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community. — Oliver Sacks

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

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely. — Oliver Sacks

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination. — Oliver Sacks

... the body, normally, is never in question: our bodies are beyond question, or perhaps beneath question - they are simply, unquestionably, there. This unquestionability of the body, is, for Wittgenstein, the start and basis of all knowledge and certainty. — 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 the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily. — Oliver Sacks

Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’. — Oliver Sacks

For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'. — Oliver Sacks

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients. — 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 needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations. — Oliver Sacks

Muscular dystrophy ... was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: 'How is it that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how is it that it is recognised only now? Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?' — Oliver Sacks

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality — Oliver Sacks

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire. — Oliver Sacks

I cannot pretend i am not without fear. — Oliver Sacks

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. — Oliver Sacks

Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them. — Oliver Sacks

Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique. — Oliver Sacks

Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape — Oliver Sacks

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design. — Oliver Sacks

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 get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in. — 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

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine. — Oliver Sacks

I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes. — Oliver Sacks

I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know. — Oliver Sacks

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does-humans are a musical species. — Oliver Sacks

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

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. ... We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music. — Oliver Sacks

Life Lessons by Oliver Sacks

1. Oliver Sacks taught us to be curious and open-minded in our approach to understanding the world and those around us. He demonstrated the importance of empathy and compassion in our interactions with others, and showed us the power of storytelling to bring people together.
2. He also showed us that it is possible to find joy and beauty in the most unexpected places, and to appreciate life’s small moments.
3. Finally, Oliver Sacks reminded us that science and art are not mutually exclusive, but can be used together to create a more meaningful and fulfilling life.