“ But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess— that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compe… Oliver Sacks
“ 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. - A… Oliver Sacks
“ I had long wanted to see true indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for… Oliver Sacks
“ Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Oliver Sacks
“ 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 indeciph… Oliver Sacks
“ In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life. Oliver Sacks
“ Thus the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious p… Oliver Sacks
“ I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached… Oliver Sacks
“ I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself. Oliver Sacks
“ I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autob… Oliver Sacks
“ Thus Aretaeus describes it, under the name of Heterocrania: And in certain cases the whole head is pained, and the pain is sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left side, or the forehead, or t… Oliver Sacks
“ I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways. Oliver Sacks
“ I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to… Oliver Sacks
