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

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

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.

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

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

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.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hope is the assurance of the promise.

I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

Stressed spelled backwards is desserts.

It's not about curing the disease, but healing the life; then the physical benefits come.

Officials of governments that use or produce landmines should be forced to see the reality of how landmines hurt people and make them suffer, because this would surely make them stop.

I thought it reasonable that I should seek the work where the work was the most abundant and the workers fewest.

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

Without peace, there is no freedom, individual or national. War and hostilities are a form of slavery.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the mysteries of prehistoric creations.