I had found myself thinking of time – time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion – whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless “moments” which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain.

— Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes

God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.

— Oliver Sacks

I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight.

— Oliver Sacks

To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.

— Oliver Sacks

The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct.

— Oliver Sacks

The drowsiness which often accompanies or precedes a severe common migraine is occasionally abstracted as a symptom in its own right, and may then constitute the sole expression of the migrainous tendency. The.

— Oliver Sacks

Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought’, independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

— Oliver Sacks

My father called swimming “the elixir of life,” and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.

— Oliver Sacks

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.

— Oliver Sacks

I had found myself thinking of time – time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion – whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless “moments” which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain.

— Oliver Sacks

Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.

— Oliver Sacks

The hateful mood of a migraine – depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible – tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. “Resolution by secretion” thus resembles a catharsis on both physiological and psychological levels, like weeping for grief. The.

— Oliver Sacks

Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One.

— Oliver Sacks

I am haunted by the density of reality.

— Oliver Sacks

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.

— Oliver Sacks

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

— Oliver Sacks

The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.

— Oliver Sacks

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

— Oliver Sacks

The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.

— Oliver Sacks

Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel – and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose – in Freud’s words, ‘Work and Love’.

— Oliver Sacks

McKenzie once called Parkinsonism “an organized chaos,” and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness of the first lies in its uncertainty, its flux; the nastiness of the second in its sense of immutable heavy permanence. Typically, indeed, treatment is only possible early, before migraine has “solidified” into immovable fixed forms.

— Oliver Sacks
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