301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds – for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.

I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.

Fascinating, Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.

Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative.

When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far,” and this was often the case.

We may see very clearly how the wrong sound, or “anti-music,” is pathogenic and migrainogenic; while the right sound – proper music – is truly tranquillising, and immediately restores cerebral health. These effects are striking, and quite fundamental, and put one in mind of Novalis’s aphorism: “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

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.

He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.