Morton Feldman Quotes

What business does memory have with time?

Memory demands an image.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

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

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

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