Stefan Zweig Quotes

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

People are machines of forgetfulness

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

Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

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

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

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

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

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

The idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.

For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.