Oliver Sacks Image Quotes

Oliver Sacks, M.D. was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.”

Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists. He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. In 1965, he moved to New York, where he was a practicing neurologist and author until his death in 2015.

Oliver Sacks is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

“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

“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 himself he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.” - 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, Seeing Voices

“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

“Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.” - Oliver Sacks

“There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. 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

“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

“He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose.” - Oliver Sacks

“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.” - Oliver Sacks

“The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.” - Oliver Sacks

“For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing - and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.” - Oliver Sacks

“But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?” - Oliver Sacks

“The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.” - Oliver Sacks

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. - Oliver Sacks

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

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement. - Oliver Sacks

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient. - Oliver Sacks

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

Music is a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine. - Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks Image Quotes

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