Oliver Sacks Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Brain, Different, Harmony

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Unique, Emotional

  Oliver Sacks (2008). “Musicophilia”, p.232, Vintage

  80 Copy quote

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

  Oliver Sacks

  Reading, Writing, Musical

  32 Copy quote

• Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

  Oliver Sacks

  Dream, Reality, Waking

  Oliver Sacks (2012). “An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales”, p.108, Vintage

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Drama, Men, Self

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.101, Pan Macmillan

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Creativity, Eye

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Frozen, Jars

  Oliver Sacks (2012). “Hallucinations”, p.93, Pan Macmillan

  20 Copy quote

• I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

  Oliver Sacks

  Way, I Can, Productive

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Civilization, Different

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Touching, Feelings

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  96 Copy quote

• I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

  Oliver Sacks

  Passion, Men, Enthusiasm

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

  66 Copy quote

• I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

  Oliver Sacks

  Almost Over, Realizing, Life Is

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.9, Pan Macmillan

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Loss, Identity

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.20, Pan Macmillan

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  Gratitude, Feelings, Special

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.14, Pan Macmillan

  113 Copy quote

• 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

  Drama, Simple, Narrative

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.152, Pan Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

  Oliver Sacks

  Gold, Sodium, Elements

  15 Copy quote

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

  Oliver Sacks

  Unique, Different, Narrative

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.101, Pan Macmillan

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Expression, Feelings

  83 Copy quote

• It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

  Oliver Sacks

  Months

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.13, Pan Macmillan

  71 Copy quote

• 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.

  66 Copy quote

• I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.

  Oliver Sacks

  Dying, Faces, Finished

  Oliver Sacks (2015). “Gratitude”, p.5, Pan Macmillan

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Passion, Animal

  "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain". Book by Oliver Sacks, October 16, 2007.

  10 Copy quote

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