Oliver Sacks Quotes

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned - the man who knew it, or the man who did not?

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)

Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

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

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

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.

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

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species - billions of people - playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.