Joshua Foer Quotes

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Power is knowing your past.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

I think it would be shocking for me to pretend not to have any past. And also, it would be a lie.

How will we know it’s us without our past?

The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.

Tell me who I am. (29)

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

What are we but our stories?

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

What we hold in our heads - our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history - is the sum of our humanity.

If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Things like the movie 'Memento' are interesting to me because our memories of the things we've done and how we've behaved form our notion of who we are, what our character is. So if part of that were missing, what does that actually say about you? And what does it say about your sense of responsibility for things if you can't remember them?

Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

The best thing about getting older is knowing history. The longer you live, the longer you have been in a sport, the more you know, and the more you know where things started.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

It's better to know your story than not to know.

If you don't know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it's kind of hard to put things together.