Music is part of being human.

I cannot pretend i am not without fear.

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.

Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what "other" people have.

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.

I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means.

Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

There is among doctors, in acute hospitals at least, a presumption of stupidity in their patients.

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.

I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

there are other senses -­ secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -­ equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.

he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.

Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.

About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

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