Daniel Gilbert Quotes

Memory... is an internal rumor.

I think memories are like dreams. Not reliable proof of anything. I can't prove a memory any more than I can prove a dream.

Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.

What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Memory changes as a person matures.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.

It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

There are always three sides to every memory…yours, theirs, and the truth, which lies somewhere in between the two

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

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

Pictures can live in one's memory. That's why they are important.

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.