Leo Kottke Quotes

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

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

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.

Most of us must learn a great deal every day in order to keep ahead of what we forget.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

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

You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

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

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.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

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

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

I worked hard at memorizing lists of facts and figures, and carried with me a book of facts.

I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

Through this experience we have been warned - learn everything, don't forget anything!

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

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.