Richard Armitage Quotes

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

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.

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.

We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species.

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

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

They always remember the last thing you do. They don't remember the things before.

I hate that our brains are wired that way. You don't remember the people that raved about us or just said something nice - I don't know why that's not in us to focus on *that*. But I think it takes a conscious effort to train our minds to change that.

I remember only what interests me.

I guess everybody's different, but I know that everybody's natural instinct is to remember the bad stuff more than the good stuff.

Men more quickly and more gladly recall what they deride than what they approve and esteem.

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

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

Statesmen remember things selectively.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

What intrigues us as a problem, and what will satisfy us as a solution, will depend upon the line we draw between what is already clear and what needs to be clarified.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

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

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

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

I don't exaggerate - I just remember big.

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.