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Oliver Sacks Quotes

Total quotes: 21
“The beauty of the forest is extraordinary — but “beauty” is too simple a word, for being here is not just an aesthetic experience, but one steeped with mystery, with awe”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: beauty, Forest, Extraordinary, Word, Aesthetic, Experience, Mystery, Awe, Wonder, Nature, Natural, Life, plants
“Now, as I wandered in the cycad forest on Rota, it seemed as if my senses were actually enlarging, as if a new sense, a time sense, was opening within me, something which might allow me to appreciate millennia or aeons as directly as I had experienced seconds or minutes.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: Forest, Trees, plants, Nature, Natural, senses, Sense, Time, Magical, Appreciate
“I find myself walking softly on the right undergrowth beneath the trees, not wanting to crack a twig, to crush or disturb anything in the least--for there is such a sense of stillness and peace that the wrong sort of movement, even one's very presence, might be fest as an intrusion, and, so to speak, anger the woods.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: sound, Forest, Nature, Natural, Trees, Leaves, twig, undergrowth, Crush, Disturb, Feet, Walking, step, Stillness, Silence, Peace, Movement, intruder, intrusion, Anger, Woods
“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
— Oliver Sacks, Opinion | Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
Tagged: Death, Memories, Legacy, Missing Someone, Fate, unique
“My father one told me that the very word "paradise" meant garden, spelling out for me the four letters (pe resh dalet samech) of pardes, the Hebrew word for garden.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: Garden, Word, Language, Spelling, Letters, Meaning, Paradise
“But it was not sudden — I did not wake up one morning and find that chemistry was dead for me; it was gradual, it stole upon me bit by bit. it happened at first, I think, without my even realizing it.”
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: chemistry, Passion, gradual, slowly, happening, realization, Realize, creep up
“I became terrified of him, for him, of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him, the more so as I could recognize similar thoughts and feelings in myself, even though they were hidden, locked up in my own depths.”
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: Scared, terrified, Nightmare, Fear, Reality, Recognize, Feelings, similar, Childhood, Child, kid
“But gardens, Eden or Kew, are not the right metaphors here, for the primeval has nothing to do with the human, but has to do with the ancient, the aboriginal, the beginning of all things.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: Gardens, Garden, Nature, Natural, Metaphor, primeval, human, Being, ancient, aboriginal, Beginning, Life, Living, living beings
“When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, “smoked salmon and Bach.””
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: five, Child, kid, Childhood, Memory, childhood memory, Favorite, Thing, Favorite Things, salmon, smoked, fish, back, Music, composer, Musician, classical
“My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else.”
— Oliver Sacks, Wikiquote.org: Oliver Sacks
Tagged: Love, Biology, Adolescence, Natural History Museum, Botanical, Garden, Zoo, Life, life forms, Living, Wonder
“Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016
Tagged: lemur, animal, Wildlife, Life, Living, Nature, Natural, Forest, Trees, dwelling, habitat, Ancestors, Vitality, inquisitive, curious
“The primeval, the sublime, are much better words here — for they indicate realms remote from the moral or the human, realms which force us to gaze into immense vistas of space and time, where the beginnings and originations of all things lie hidden.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: primeval, Sublime, Words, realm, Remote, Moral, human, Nature, Natural, Being, Life, Living, force, Space, Time, Beginning, Origin
“I wonder where it will go, whether it will survive, will be cast back here on Rota, or taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to another island in the Pacific. Ten minutes more ad I can no longer see it--it is launched, like a little ship, on its journey on the high seas.”
— Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colorblind
Tagged: Wonder, travel, Sea, Journey, Ship, Island, pacific, Ocean, Distance, far, miles
“Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.”
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: Hydrogen selenide, chemical, Gas, Smell, worst, Hell, hydrogen telluride, brimstone, River, Fiery, odor, lake
“It was at this time that I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science--focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos.”
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: Seek, sought, Achieve, Concentration, Absorption, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, Science, Chaos, Study
“Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects—seeming breakdowns in the course of nature itself.”
— Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Tagged: creature, Create Your Life, Living, Moral, Passion, Passionate, Right, Wrong, Treatment, Land, Law, divine, cosmic, Cosmos, cosmic law, Violation, law of nature, Sense
“"Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.” All this makes Temple passionately angry, and passionately concerned for humane reform: she wants to reform the treatment of the handicapped, especially the autistic, as she wants to reform the treatment of cattle in the meat industry.”
— Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Tagged: Capital Punishment, States, animal, Handicap, Humane, Reform, rights, autistic, cattle, Meat, Industry, meat industry, farm animals
“It came upon me sometime in my fifteenth year that I no longer woke up with sudden excitements—“Today I will get the Clerici solution! Today I will read about Humphry Davy and electric fish! Today I will finally understand diamagnetism, perhaps!” I no longer seemed to get these sudden illuminations, these epiphanies, these excitements which Flaubert (whom I was now reading) called “erections of the mind.” Erections of the body, yes, this was a new, exotic part of life—but those sudden raptures of the mind, those sudden landscapes of glory and illumination, seemed to have deserted or abandoned me. Or had I, in fact, abandoned them?”
— Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Tagged: Excitement, Body, Mind, illumination, Epiphany, Rapture, Landscape, glory, deserted, Abandon
“While autism is a developmental disorder, sometimes a devastating one, there is always within the autism a unique and sometimes strangely gifted individual. The great psychoanalyst Winicott used to feel that there was something like a tulip in every person and this was their essence and that this internal part of them was inaccessible to the person themselves and should not be meddled with or touched by psychoanalysis or anything else and one wonders if there is not some autistic essence like this tulip which needs to be respected and not meddled with.”
— Oliver Sacks, Wikiquote.org: Oliver Sacks
Tagged: Autism, Disorder, Development, devastating, Individual, gifted, Special, psychoanalyst, psychoanalysis, Respect
“Temple, who was driving, suddenly faltered and wept. “I’ve read that libraries are where immortality lies. . . . I don’t want my thoughts to die with me. . . . I want to have done something. . . . I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution—know that my life has meaning. Right now, I’m talking about things at the very core of my existence.” I was stunned. As I stepped out of the car to say goodbye, I said, “I’m going to hug you. I hope you don’t mind.” I hugged her—and (I think) she hugged me back.”
— Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Tagged: Drive, Driving, falter, Weep, cry, library, Collection, Immortality, Truth, Lie, contribution positive, Meaning, Existence, Core, goodbye, bye, Hug, Sad, Life, purpose
“There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”
— Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
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