When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the early preferences of the author, highlighting the joy found in simple pleasures and artistic appreciation.
In this quote, Oliver Sacks shares a childhood memory that illustrates how, even at a young age, he had a deep appreciation for the finer things in life, such as smoked salmon and the music of Bach. This revelation speaks to the idea that our tastes and interests can be indicative of our deeper selves and that joy can be found in both food and art, which shape our identities and experiences.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of nurturing a child's passions.
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
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.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland.
I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.
The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings!
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