Oliver Sacks Quotes

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Some people spend their time and thoughts in feeling, hearing, seeing, and listening. Whatever cannot be felt or experienced they will not accept. We call these people 'emotional.'

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

Our body is the place that our memories and dreams call home for the time being.

It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.

Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.

If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.

Anyone who says he is not emotional is not getting what he should out of life.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Hale, stop it.” Kat reached out and grabbed his arm. “You are many things, but stupid isn't one of them.” “I'm too close.” “You don't get it, do you? Being close is good. Caring is good. I love that you're emotional and passionate and can't turn these things off.” “It makes me a bad thief.” “It makes you a good person.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.

Life without emotions is like an engine without fuel.

It is better to be loved by one person who knows your soul than millions who don't even know your phone number.

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

Attention without feeling is only a report.

We are not machines exploring the universe, we are people.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

Why does the blind man's wife paint herself.

She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.

I am what I feel and think and do.