Michael Ignatieff Quotes

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

Normal people have nothing to forget.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

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

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

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

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.

When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.

All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind, Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune, Following the donkey's bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses, On the high door of a skull and in some corner, Of an irrefrangible eye, Some old man memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.