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Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes

Neurologist

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Famous Oliver Sacks Quotes

“Can you not see artistic development— how he renounced the realism of his earlier years, and advanced into abstract, nonrepresentational art?’ He had indeed moved from realism to nonrepresentation to the abstract, yet this was not the artist, but the pathology, advancing—advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality, were being destroyed. This wall of paintings was a tragic pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art. And yet, I wondered, was she not partly right? For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.”

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Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“...he approached these faces— even of those near and dear—as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. No face was familiar to him, seen as a ‘thou’, being just identified as a set of features, an ‘it’. Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression. A face, to us, is a person looking out—we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face.”

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Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.”

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Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“It’s just like the eating,’ she explained. ‘I put his usual clothes out, in all the usual places, and he dresses without difficulty, singing to himself. He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses the thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes—or his own body. He sings all the time—eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“Jimmie both was and wasn’t aware of this deep, tragic loss in himself, loss of himself. (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.)”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryNeuroscienceAmnesia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“...he solved all the puzzles, and could solve them easily; and he was far better and sharper than anyone else at games. And as he found this out, he grew fretful and restless again, and wandered the corridors, uneasy and bored and with a sense of indignity—games and puzzles were for children, a diversion. Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel—and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose...”

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Book:Gratitude
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“To restore the human subject at the center—the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a “who” as well as a “what,” a real person, a patient, in relation to disease—in relation to the physical. The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.”

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Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings
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“To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.”

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Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic
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