William Harvey Quotes

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

And never forget, there is memory.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

Aren't memories just dreams we have when we're awake?

The mind's capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.

Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

He blinked a few times, each motion so slow that he was never quite sure if he’d get his eyes open again. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Funny how he was only just realizing it. Funnier still that he couldn’t seem to summon any concern for her maidenly sensibilities. She might be blushing. He couldn’t tell. It was too dark to see. But it didn’t matter. This was Honoria. She was a good egg. A sensible egg. She wouldn’t be scarred forever by the sight of his chest.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

Reality is what trips you up when you walk around with your eyes closed.