Herbert A. Simon Quotes

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

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Memory feeds imagination.

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.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Our memories are independent of our wills.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

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. My poison, my food.

Don't think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

Forget that blind ambition, and learn to trust your intuition.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.