Information Recall Quotes

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

A pamphlet is usually read but once, but a song is heard over and over again.

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

I just have pretty good recall of information.

What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.

People ask me, How would you do as a contestant on the show? And I tell them I would do fairly well among senior citizens, but against a good thirty-year-old I would have trouble because I cannot recall information as quickly as I used to. You used to say something and I would go, boom, right away, very sharp. Now it's like, Oh, yes, but wait a minute, uh, uh.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

Perhaps, to the uninformed, it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning; but the close alliance with each other, of the different branches of science, will explain the difficulty.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

I have a bad memory for facts.

[...]my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!” “Mine is erratic,” he said imperturbably. “I remember only what interests me.

An important verity about knowledge is that the brain works most effectively with consciously retained information. We more easily remember what we want to recall later. When we feed our fourteen billion brain cells with information that will enrich us and help others, we are really learning to Think Big.

The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

When you get asked hundreds of questions, it's not possible to remember the answer to every one.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

My biggest problem is retaining the exact information.

Nulla (enim) res tantum ad dicendum proficit, quantum scriptio Nothing so much assists learning as writing down what we wish to remember.

I don't make any notes, but I do know where to find things. Suppose I need to know where Wexford first talked about his love of the countryside or where he quotes Larkin or what was the beginning of his hatred of racism or where he first encountered domestic violence; I would be able to find it straight away.

How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place.

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.