Quotessence
Home / Authors / Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes

Neurologist

Filter quotes by topic

AllBrainIfsSciencePsychologyFeelingsPeopleIdentitySelfThinkingWorldLanguagePatientFeelsHumansLifeMemoriesMenMusicalHallucinationsUnique

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.”

ArtSelfScienceHistoryPsychologyIdentityAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“He recognized a portrait of Einstein because he picked up the characteristic hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people. ‘Ach, Paul!’ he said, when shown a portrait of his brother. ‘That square jaw, those big teeth— I would know Paul anywhere!’ But was it Paul he recognized, or one or two of his features, on the basis of which he could make a reasonable guess as to the subject’s identity?”

SelfBrainFamilyHistoryPsychologyNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“...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.”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“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.”

SelfBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“...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...”

LifeSelfBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryAmnesia
Book:Gratitude
Create image

“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.”

IfsMenNeedsSelfStoriesOur LivesIdentityDramaNarrativeLife Story
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic
Create image