Oliver Sacks Quotes

In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.

Personal style isn't simply an exercise in parroting but rather an exhibition for our own stories - from the gait of our walk to the rhythm of our speech to the manner in which the necktie falls from the knot.

I wouldn't compare myself to any past Idol contestant, because I don't feel like I am like any of them. Maybe stories are cool but my story is different from most people's story. I don't like to compare myself to other people, I like to just be me.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Don't worry if people think you're good. Make this your experience. And find out what makes you unique as an artist. You don't get the opportunity to do that as much in the real world.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

When you get to heaven God won't ask you why you weren't more like Billy Graham. He may ask you why you weren't more like you. Get in touch with who you are. Lead with your own unique style. Be yourself and let God use you.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.

For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

You are not a powerless speck of dust drifting around in the wind...we are, each of us, like beautiful snowflakes-unique, and born for a specific reason and purpose.

We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

It is possible to analyze the biological and social influences that make each human being unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable, but this analysis does not explain how and why each feels different from all other human beings.

A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.

It still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions.

In knowing ourselves to be unique, we possess the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual....Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it.

God created each one of us in our own unique way. Just like a snowflake we all hold a blueprint that differs one from another. It's great to lose weight and keep our bodies healthy and strong, but it's also important that we appreciate who we are today - with or without extra pounds.

I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.

From the very beginning you are being told to compare yourself with others. This is the greatest disease; it is like a cancer that goes on destroying your very soul because each individual is unique, and comparison is not possible. I am just myself and you are just yourself. There is nobody else in the world you can be compared with.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.