Quotes from Oliver Sacks

I think hallucinations need to be discussed. There are all sorts of hallucinations, and then many sorts which are okay, like the ones I think which most of us have in bed at night before we fall asleep, when we can see all sorts of patterns or faces and scenes.

Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no 'day before'.

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

Music is part of being human.

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.

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.