301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity...

This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self became nobody.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace –.

This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or.

Ucho w liczbach:” A youthful ear can hear ten octaves of sound, spanning a range from about thirty to twelve tousand vibrations a second. The avarege ear can distinguish sounds a seventeenth of a tone apart. From top to bottom we hear about fourtheen tousend discriminable tones.

They were all, in a sense, amateurs – self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution – and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world.

There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.

I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.

For ‘wellness’, naturally is no cause of complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of ‘wrongness’ or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being ‘very well’, they may become suspicious if they feel ‘too well’.