Thomas Merton Quotes

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

We forget how quickly the American people forget.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Continents of memory had been lost.

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.