George Santayana Quotes

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

People only remember what they want to remember.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Memories contain hidden editorials on current events.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

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

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.