Cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and...
You keep pressing me, he said, to say that the attacks start with this symptom or that symptom, this phenomenon or that phenomenon, but this is not the way I experience them. It doesn’t start with one...
You have done useful, honorable work. Come home. All is forgiven
Writing to him a few days later, I said that the experience was a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor…. I never had a feeling of such incandescence.
William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal bal...
What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here—that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely
Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as the Mozart of psychology.
Travel now by all means—if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these,...
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...
To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.
Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per ce...
This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a ‘motor individual’ (Sherrington’s term for the person who emerges through acts).
They were all, in a sense, amateurs—self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution—and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troub...
These were fossil behaviors, Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in th...
There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precise...
There is no need, he said, suddenly getting serious, to get dead drunk, pass out, and lie in the gutter. This is a very sad—even dangerous—thing to do. I hope you will never do it again.
There are similar irrefutable beliefs in patients who lose the perception of their left side and the left side of space but maintain that there is nothing missing, even though we can demonstrate convi...
There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony . . . a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself an...
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.
The tritone - an augmented fourth (or, in hazz parlance, a flatted fifth) - is a difficult interval to sing and has often been regarded as having an ugly, uncanny, or even diabolical quality. Its use...