Quote of the Day (Oliver Sacks, on the Human Need to ‘Transcend, Transport, Escape’)

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”— British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), Hallucinations (2012)

The image accompanying this post of Dr. Oliver Sacks was taken in 1985 by Bernard Gotfryd and is part of his collection at the Library of Congress.