Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Oliver Sacks (British Neurologist, Writer)

Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933–2015) was a British neurologist and writer. He was one of the world’s most respected neurologists, having made a name for himself in the field of neurology with his work with post-encephalitic patients in New York hospitals. He also won acclaim for his sympathetic case histories of patients with rare neurological disorders.

Born in London into a family of physicians and scientists, Sacks earned his medical degree at Queen’s College in Oxford and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and the University of California Los Angles. He lived in New York since 1965, practicing as a neurologist at New York University and Columbia University.

Sacks was also well known for his best-selling books, including A Leg to Stand On (1984,) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986,) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995.) Awakenings (1973,) his autobiographical account of treating patients with encephalitis lethargica, a condition that renders people motionless, was later adapted in an acclaimed film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Sacks’s autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001,) reveals how family traditions shaped his passion for science in its many forms. His Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brai (2007) describes the healing power of music.

Sacks died months after being diagnosed with terminal eye cancer—the ocular melanoma had previously been treated spread to his liver. A collection of essays, The River of Consciousness (2017,) was published posthumously.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by 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

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

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

Patients who can get even part of the way to acknowledging their mortality ultimately do themselves an untold favor.
Oliver Sacks

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

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
Oliver Sacks
Topics: Ideas

A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.
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.
Oliver Sacks
Topics: Self-Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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