Oliver Sacks Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• 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.

  Oliver Sacks

  Eye, Principles, Language

  Oliver Sacks (2011). “The Mind's Eye”, p.137, Pan Macmillan

• 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

  Moving, Dancing, Musical

  Oliver Sacks (2013). “Migraine”, p.445, Vintage

• 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

  Ocean, Brain, Sitting

• And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

  Oliver Sacks

  Dream, Memories, Confused

  "Uncle Tungsten". Book by Oliver Sacks, 2001.

• 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

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Science

  Oliver Sacks (2013). “Seeing Voices”, Vintage

• 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

  Mean, Community, Encounters

• 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

  Children, Unique, Two

  Source: www.spiegel.de

• 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

  Memories, People, Giving

  Source: www.spiegel.de

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin