Eric Hoffer Quotes

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Memory is imagination pinned down.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event.

What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

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