Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.
Interpretation
Nature is chaotic and unpredictable, lacking a clear direction or design.
Oliver Sacks reflects on the essence of nature, suggesting that it is not a perfect, orderly process but rather one filled with mistakes and randomness. This chaos constitutes the natural world, where progress is not linear and design is absent, emphasizing the intrinsic complexity of life and the environment.
In practice
During a nature conservation seminar, to emphasize the unpredictability of ecosystems.
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.
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.
Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.
Our very contract with nature has a deep restorative power; contemplation of its magnificence imparts peace and serenity.
This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Any observer is an intruder in the domain of a wild animal and must remember that the rights of that animal supersede human interests. An observer must also keep in mind that an animal's memories of one day's contact might well be reflected in the following day's behavior.
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