Jean Paul Quotes

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

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

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

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

Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life - reality.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

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

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.

Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estrangedmemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Remember me for these days, not the old ones.

Letters remind us that when we write we can bring back the best of times, even make time stand still, if only for a few minutes.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

Memories just get richer with time.

Time's the thief of memory