301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it’s memory.

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.

Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the world.

In all the annals of human heroics, I find no theme more ennobling than the compensations that people struggle to discover and implement when life’s misfortunes have deprived them of basic attributes of our common nature. Steve.

I appreciated that all animals have some form of mental life that reflects the architecture of their nervous system.

The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. – Alvaro Pascual-Leone.

We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a “third world” of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both?

Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.

Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of “thinking in pure meanings.” I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth – it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.