William James Quotes

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.

What a wonderful faculty is memory! -- the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds -- this faithful witness against us for good or evil.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.

[...]my memory is reasonably good—unlike yours, dear sir!” “Mine is erratic,” he said imperturbably. “I remember only what interests me.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.

A story is ultimately a memory. It's important when you're telling a story to think about why this memory is a memory. You don't remember everything in life; you just remember certain things - so, why this one?

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Memory is the receptacle and sheath of all knowledge

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.

People don't really absorb everything they read or hear. They just look at it quickly, and then they choose to remember what they want to remember.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

Memory - the very skin of life.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.