Leon Wieseltier Quotes

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

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

I'm one of those weird people that tends to not do the extras and listen to the commentaries and stuff on movies, although I do think they are fascinating and interesting - I'm just so worried that years later I wouldn't remember anything!

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram.

For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of our brains - we outsource essential cognitive functions, like memory, to them, which means they soak up much more information than we realize.

Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.

I forgot more than you'll ever know.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

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.

She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. [...] It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. [...] It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

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

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.

Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.

We choose to forget aspects of ourselves and then we forget that we've forgotten.

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.

There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.

Right. I'd forgotten about her.' He shook his head. 'That keeps happening.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.