Stefan Zweig Quotes

People only remember what they want to remember.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

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

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

The question that comes up a lot is, if you had the chance to erase your memory of something specific, what would you erase? And my answer has always been, I wouldn't erase anything, personally. In some ways, I almost wouldn't want to erase anything from the public consciousness, either, for the same reason.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.