Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCPwas a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for stage and film...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth9 July 1933
eye imagination brain
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
eye principles language
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
dream memories confused
And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [...] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.
months
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
eye men self
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
communication thinking people
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
numbers elements boyhood
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.
unique narrative different
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.
medicine patient cardinals
There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
dying faces face-to-face
I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
musical being-human music-is
Music is part of being human.
social bonding cement
Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement
almost-over life-is realizing
I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
way i-can productive
I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can