301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

I realize that if love were the cure, I would have been healed a long time ago.

We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses -- secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -- equally vital, but unrecognised, and unlauded. These senses, unconscious, automatic, had to be discovered.

But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians.

Cualquier enfermedad introduce una duplicidad en la vida: un "ello", con sus propias necesidades, exigencias y limitaciones.

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

With neurology, if you go far enough with it, and you keep going, you end up getting weird. If you go a little further, you end up in the spirit.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain...Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.

My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.