We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that communication helps us clarify our own thoughts as much as it informs others.
Oliver Sacks highlights the dual purpose of speech, suggesting that when we express our ideas verbally, we not only convey information to others but also engage in self-reflection and understanding. The act of speaking allows us to externalize our thoughts, making them more tangible and comprehensible, thus revealing to ourselves our innermost beliefs and understandings.
In practice
In a public speaking workshop to illustrate the importance of articulating thoughts.
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.
In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
Let us not complain against men because otheir rudeness, their ingratitude, their injustice, their arrogance, their love oself, their forgetfulness oothers. They are so made. Such is their nature.
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