Oliver Sacks Quotes

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”

“It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

“Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.”

“Music is part of being human.”

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

“Perception is never purely in the present – it has to draw on experience of the past. We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recalled and admixed with every new perception.”

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”

“The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace.”

“There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.”

“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals. We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as 'tick-tock, tick-tock' – even though it is actually 'tick tick, tick tick'.”