Oliver Sacks Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.

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

he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

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

Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

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.

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

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

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.

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

I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.

Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.