301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

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.

One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes.

And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.

Music has a bonding power, it’s primal social cement.

None of us had ever encountered, or even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.

Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty. But it does not have to have any ‘meaning’ whatever. One may recall music, give it the life of imagination simply because one likes it – this is reason enough. Or perhaps there may be no reason at all, as Rodolfo Llinas points out.

An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind –.

For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.

We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?