301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday – a special bottle that could neither leak nor break – he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.

Vygotsky has been described – not unjustly – as “the Mozart of psychology.

My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her – and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.

Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I’m concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.

Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.

To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.

As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?’ – and.

Far commoner, and perhaps the most intolerable of all aura symptoms, is intense sudden vertigo accompanied by staggering, overwhelming nausea, and frequently vomiting. The.

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.