Oliver Sacks Quotes
1933–2015 England
Oliver W. Sacks (9 July 1933 - 30 August 2015) was a British-born neurologist and author living in New York City.
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Also known as: Uncle Tungsten
Random Oliver Sacks quote
5 quotes
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, “smoked salmon and Bach.” (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)
Uncle Tungsten (2001)
Hydrogen selenide, I decided, was perhaps the worst smell in the world. But hydrogen telluride came close, was also a smell from hell. An up-to-date hell, I decided, would have not just rivers of fiery brimstone, but lakes of boiling selenium and tellurium, too.
Uncle Tungsten (2001)
Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects—seeming breakdowns in the course of nature itself.
Lemurs are close to the ancestral stock from which all primates arose, and I am happy to think that one of my own ancestors, 50 million years ago, was a little tree-dwelling creature not so dissimilar to the lemurs of today. I love their leaping vitality, their inquisitive nature.
My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else.