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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stephen Fry English Actor, Writer
- Jonathan Miller English Stage Director
- Harold Pinter British Playwright
- W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
- Alain de Botton Swiss-born British Philosopher
- Maurice Sendak American Writer, Illustrator
- Yuval Noah Harari Israeli Historian
- Lionel Trilling American Critic
- Eric Bentley British-American Drama Critic
- Jacques Barzun American Cultural Historian
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