Michael Pollan Quotes

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

My memory's pretty much gone.

When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

Short term memory is not good.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

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

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

Normal people have nothing to forget.

Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. They were like that way before the Internet came along.

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

There are a lot of times when I walk into a room and forget why I walked in there. I'm going through some studies right now, and I am going to do a brain scan.

At 60, I could do the same things I could do at 30, if I could only remember what those things are.

If we should remember everything we would be as worse off as if we remembered nothing.

I literally forget everything, and, trust me, that's the best thing that you can have.

My teammates will tell you I find it hard to remember what happened two weeks earlier, let alone what happened a decade and a half back.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

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

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

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

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

You have not forgotten to remember; You have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember - and generally more practical.

Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.