William Lyon Phelps Quotes

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

Over time, I've paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I've gone through.

Read much, but not many books.

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.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

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

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn't read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it'll work as well as reading print worked for me.

I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.

I read slowly, I watch movies slowly, because I retain everything.

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

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.

We never read without profit if with the pen or pencil in our hand we mark such ideas as strike us by their novelty, or correct those we already possess.

It is no learning to understand what you do not retain.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Have read little and understood less.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

A reader does not suddenly comprehend what is being read or studied, in a snap, miraculously. Comprehension needs to be worked forged, by those who read and study; as subjects of the action, they must seek to employ appropriate instruments in order to carry out the task. For this very reason, reading and studying form a challenging task, one requiring patience and perseverance.

Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

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

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.