Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
You'll remember every damn loss. But the wins? You don't necessarily remember.
Man learns more readily and remembers more willingly what excites his ridicule than what deserves his esteem and respect.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.
It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.
Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.
Generally people forget the past and the path they took.
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
A man forgets his good luck next day, but remembers his bad luck until next year.
People are machines of forgetfulness
Human memory is short and terribly fickle.
You don't forget the movies, but you forget the details of them.
Performing in the theater is a very ethereal profession because you do it once and it goes out into the ether and it goes into people's minds and that's the only place that it ever exists. And it never exists truly; it only exists in the way that people think they remember it. But it's a really powerful way to tell a story and to pass something on.
Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.
Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.
I only see clearly what I remember.
Our minds and memories are crowded with the common experience of nature.
Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
Computers have wonderful memories. Human memory is more fuzzy.
It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.
We move so fast that memory is something we can only grasp
