I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
- Oliver Sacks
My religion is nature. That's what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.
- Oliver Sacks
David Hockney, working in nature on Woldgate Woods
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.
- Oliver Sacks
- Oliver Sacks
Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.
- David Hockney
I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
- Oliver Sacks
Perception is never purely in the present – it has to draw on experience of the past; this is why Gerald M. Edelman speaks of “the remembered present.” We all have detailed memories of how things have previously looked and sounded, and these memories are recalled and admixed with every new perception.
[…]
“Every act of perception,” Edelman writes, “is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
- Oliver Sacks
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