Oliver Sacks Quotes

He who feels it, knows it more.

To most magicians, cards themselves are marvels...For one thing, they feel special in your hand. Touching them, holding them, shuffling - the whole process is almost poetic. If you're in a room full of magicians and someone just mentions the word cards, within seconds, everyone is digging into their pockets and pulling out a deck of cards. It's one of the most amazing feelings ever.

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

What can I say without touching the earth with my hands?

Understanding comes about through feeling, from moment to moment in the mirror of relationship.

In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

His lips tasted cool and sharp, peppermint, winter, but his hands, soft on the back of my neck, promised long days and summer and forever.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?

We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

I was brought up singing gospel, and I really enjoy getting the church up on their feet, their hips swaying, their hands clapping, it's a great feeling to evoke that energy for the Lord.

We who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.

It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.

Okay, you were probably taught there are five senses," he said. "We see, hear, touch, smell and taste. But how do we know those are the only five? What are the senses that we don't have? What are we failing to perceive?

In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.

I've never had anything cold and wet touching my butthole before. That was quite the experience!

It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.