Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Quotes

Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?

Smells are so powerful and evocative, sometimes stronger than visual cues.

You can't find the sound if you just love sleep.

Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.

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

Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.

Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.

Go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it....Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.

In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

I woke with a start. At first I assumed I'd trumped myself awake again.

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.

I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

Dreams are nothing but incoherent ideas, occasioned by partial or imperfect sleep.

Creativity comes from the part of the brain that is veritable soup of experiences, memories and influences. We really don't like to start questioning exactly where it comes from, in case it stops coming.

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake.

When you sleep your eyes move left and right and physical movement takes trauma and moves it from your frontal lobe to the back of your brain or to another part of the brain where you can store it that memory but when you think about those things that happened, you don't associate the feeling that normally comes with it. So the problem is if you have something traumatic happen and you are not getting a good amount of rest, it will stay in your frontal lobe.

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Discover the great ideas that lie inside you by discovering the power of sleep.