Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

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

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

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.

I have a great memory.

People always complain about their memories, never about their minds.

Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.

President Reagan doesn't retain very much of what comes his way on a given day.

Forget: Refuse to dwell; let go and loosen one's hold, particularly on memory. To forget is an active - not passive - endeavor.

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.

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

The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

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

To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd

I don't even know my own phone number.

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

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

Men forget everything; women remember everything. That's why men need instant replay in sports. They've already forgotten what's happened.

It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.