Forgets Quotes & Sayings

I want to be respected. I want to be powerful. And yes, I want to be special. I want to leave a mark on this world so no one forgets who I was. — Morgan Rhodes

Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force. — Kim Stanley Robinson

If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. — Martin Luther King Jr.

And Desire smiles, and forgets, for Desire is a creature of the moment. — Neil Gaiman

Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring. — William Alexander

The colonialist's existence is so closely aligned with that of the colonized that he will never be able to overcome the argument which states that misfortune is good for something. With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great. At the same time his privileges arise just as much from his glory as from degrading the colonized. — Albert Memmi

Money forgets ... Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge. — Jaron Lanier

Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed. — Anne-Marie O'Connor

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. — Robert Macfarlane

It is impossible indeed not to look with considerable uneasiness at the type of the "modern economist" as he developed after Keynes' revolutionary book, whom Keynes himself regarded with alarm at the end of his days. It is the type of man who is obsessed by one thing, i.e. "effective demand," which he thinks must be kept up at whatever cost,
while he forgets the working of the mechanism of prices, wages, interest and exchange rates. — Wilhelm Ropke

God never forgets the tasks He gives you. — Sunday Adelaja

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment. — Terry Pratchett

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either.
It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind. — Alexander Chee

Because time passes, and memories fade, but a beating heart never truly forgets anything. Never. — J.M. Darhower

Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery and would exist if all humanity forgets it, so it is with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits were there before their discovery and would remain even if we forget them. — Swami Vivekananda

A man never forgets his mistakes. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany ... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity. — Mircea Eliade

I love language, words, and all the lovely, exciting, and heart wrenching things you can do with them. Pick the right ones, put them in the right order, and you've created a moment in time where the reader forgets about the late car payment, the dirty dishes, the impending workweek. You have created a state of bliss. Or negligence, depending on your perspective. — Darynda Jones

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane. — Joseph Wood Krutch

What is my true substance?
What will remain of me after my death?
Our life is as short as a raging fire:
flames the passer-by soon forgets,
ashes the wind blows away.
A man's life. — Omar Khayyam

When I'm right, no one remembers.When I am wrong, no one forgets. — Larry Goetz

Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it. — Jean De La Bruyere

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. — Michael Gurnow

Although, fanciful's origin circa 1627 made me still love the word, even if I'd ruined its applicability to my connection with Snarl. (I mean DASH!) Like, I could totally see Mrs. Mary Poppencock returning home to her cobblestone hut with the thatched roof in Thamesburyshire, Jolly Olde England, and saying to her husband, "Good sir Bruce, would it not be wonderful to have a roof that doesn't leak when it rains on our green shires, and stuff?" And Sir Bruce Poppencock would have been like, "I say, missus, you're very fanciful with your ideas today." To which Mrs. P. responded, "Why, Master P., you've made up a word! What year is it? I do believe it's circa 1627! Let's carve the year
we think
on a stone so no one forgets. Fanciful! Dear man, you are a genius. I'm so glad my father forced me to marry you and allow you to impregnate me every year. — Rachel Cohn

But Fortune, who never forgets her duty, turns her wheel suddenly. — Marie De France

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.
What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?
Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
Like whips that map the countries of the air. — Richard Wilbur

'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. — John Milton

Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that. — Bruce Jackson

France bleeds, but liberty smiles, and before the smile of liberty, France forgets her wound. — Victor Hugo

A reader reads a book. If it's a good book, he forgets himself. That's all a book has to do. When the reader can't forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it's fun you're after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster. That — Herman Koch

Yes!
still I love thee: Time, who sets
His signet on my brow,
And dims my sunken eye, forgets,
The heart he could not bow;
Where love, that cannot perish, grows
For one, Alas! that little knows
How love may sometimes last;
Like sunshine wasting in the skies
When clouds are overcast. — Rufus Dawes

The word everyone forgets is 'serve' ... Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking the city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of 'taking,' as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a solider, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives. — Robert Jackson Bennett

If you love someone your heart will always remember them. Even if the mind doesn't, the heart never forgets. — Alexandra Potter

The bait is the means to get the fish where you want it, catch the fish and you forget the bait. The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it, catch the rabbit and forget the snare. Words are the means to get the idea where you want it, catch on to the idea and you forget about the words. Where shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him? — Zhuangzi

The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow. But she never forgets that Resistance is using criticism against her on a far more diabolical level. Resistance enlists criticism to reinforce the fifth column of fear already at work inside the artist's head, seeking to break her will and crack her dedication. The professional does not fall for this. Her resolution, before all others, remains: No matter what, I will never let Resistance beat me. — Steven Pressfield

Here's something about Mom: she's bad with annoyances, but great in a crisis. If a waiter doesn't refill her water after she's asked three times, or she forgets her dark glasses when the sun comes out, look out! But when it comes to something truly bad happening, Mom plugs into this supreme calm. — Maria Semple

And if you'd been healthy and happy, you wouldn't have come home?"
"When everything is lost a man seeks refuge, as if he were returning to his mother's womb."
"And after that?"
"After that he forgets. He's driven to it by his restlessness. He wants to be what he was not, or what he was. He runs away from his fortune and looks for another. — Mesa Selimovic

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. — Lloyd Jones

The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets that she took him. — Oscar Wilde

The meditative angler is not exempt from sensational periods. There are times when all the uncertainty of his chosen pursuit seems to condense itself into one big chance, and stand out before him like a salmon on the top wave of a rapid. He sees his luck hangs by a single strand of gut, and he cannot tell whether it will hold or break. This is the thrilling moment and he never forgets it. — Henry Van Dyke

There are some things a girl never forgets, Ry. And one of those is a kiss from the right guy. — Julie James

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel. — Carlos Fuentes

You're just as much an outsider as I am. I've read your dissertations."
"You have?" She's surprised.
"Believe it or not, I can read too." I shake my head. "It's like everyone forgets I only missed one question on the Institute's slangsmarts test."
"Ew. You missed a question?" She wrinkles her nose as she picks a practice razor from a bench. "I suppose that's why you weren't in Minerva. — Pierce Brown

You see, dervish, it wasn't always like this. Violence wasn't my element, but it is now. When God forgets about us down here, it falls upon us common people to toughen up and restore justice. So next time you talk to him, you tell him that let him know that when he abandons his lambs, they won't meekly wait to be slaughtered. They will turn into wolves. — Elif Shafak

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. — Susan Sontag

GOVERNOR. And then I must call your attention to the history teacher. He has a lot of learning in his head and a store of facts. That's evident. But he lectures with such ardor that he quite forgets himself. Once I listened to him. As long as he was talking about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was not so bad. But when he reached Alexander of Macedon, I can't describe what came over him. Upon my word, I thought a fire had broken out. He jumped down from the platform, picked up a chair and dashed it to the floor. Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs. The state must bear the cost. — Nikolai Gogol

Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man's eternal life. — Andre Malraux

No member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has canned peas, topped beets, hauled hay, shoveled coal, or helped in any way to serve others ever forgets or regrets the experience of helping provide for those in need. — Thomas S. Monson

Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion - science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. — Leo Tolstoy

Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative "low risk" game. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Only those who play win. Only those who risk win. History favors risk-takers. Forgets the timid. Everything else is commentary. — Iveta Cherneva

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds. — Anthony Trollope

Sometimes one forgets that not everyone in this world is a bastard. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn't matter. It was all God. It is God and God's grace that heals, not our prayers and not our "faith." Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish. DO — Eric Metaxas

Things I Want Decided

Which shouldn't exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you're alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things -
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world? — Izumi Shikibu

Ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude. — Sallust

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be. — Studs Terkel

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people. — Diane Setterfield

You will remember this number. you will memorize it. you will answer when it is called. you have no name any longer. just a number. any prisoner who forgets his number or doesn't respond when his number is called will be shot. do you understand? — Joel C. Rosenberg

She likes herself, yet others hates / For that which in herself she prizes; And, while she laughs at them, forgets / She is the thing that she despises. — William Congreve

After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding ... we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun ... He drove everyone mad in Chrestomanci Castle by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pajamas. 'And he could get them right anyway by magic,' Millie told me, 'if he wasn't too lazy to learn how ... But the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person's name. If a person isn't important to him, he always forgets their name.'
When Millie said this, I realized that Christopher had never once forgotten my name ... — Diana Wynne Jones

Thorndyke never forgets a likely case. He is sort of a medico-legal camel. He gulps down the raw facts from the newspapers or elsewhere, and then, in his leisure moments, he calmly regurgitates them and has a quiet chew at them. — R. Austin Freeman

A man who keeps a diary pays, Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes eventful-then, His busy hand forgets the pen. Most books, indeed, are records less Of fulness than of emptiness. — William Allingham

- Oscar Wilde said that we always destroy the thing we love the most. And it is true. The simple possibility of achieving that which we desire causes the soul of the common man to be filled with guilt. He looks around, and sees many others who have not succeeded, and so he thinks he does not deserve it. He forgets everything he overcame, all he suffered, everything he had to renounce in order to come this far. I know many people who, when they are within reach of their Personal Legend, make a series of silly mistakes and do not attain their objective - when it was just one step away. — Paulo Coelho

That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. But this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals the mystery to me. He that forgets all being caused as he decides from the depths, he that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance
this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of his freedom. It is not his limit but his completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate
with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light
looks like grace itself. — Martin Buber

It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was. — Rachel Cusk

One forgets that one is one. I must try to remember this. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. — Albert Camus

The world of "magick" is, nine times out of ten, a world where people can hide their deep-set insecurity and personal damage behind illusion, constructed identities and claims to privileged knowledge, power or spiritual status. A gaudy carnival magic show, conducted with props that have long since begun to disintegrate with age, that seems to function only to distract people from the real magic that is occurring all around them, in every facet of their lives, every day of their lives. While the rituals and magical techniques of the Temple seem overly simplistic in comparison with the loftier Qabalahs, tables of correspondences and secret formulae of "high" magick, they have one thing which high magick quite often forgets: a concrete function. — Jason Louv

All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets, and a woman forgives but never forgets. That's how it is. That's why women aren't allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant. — Tove Jansson

They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies ... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you. — Aaron Koblin

Half-way through any big project, everyone forgets what they're doing. — J. Michael Straczynski

The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect. — Henry David Thoreau

Do people look the same when they get to heaven?" "I don't know. I don't think so." "Then how do people recognize each other?" "I don't know, sweetie." She sounded tired. "They just feel it. You don't need your eyes to love, right? You just feel it inside you. That's how it is in heaven. It's just love, and no one forgets who they love. — R.J. Palacio

For a split second every morning, she forgets. And then the black heaviness is there, and she wonders what it is, and then she remembers. — Lisa Genova

[Lockyer] ... sometimes forgets he is only the editor and not the author of Nature.
[Lockyer was the first editor of Nature.] — James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

We're in an era where the demand is for immediate hits that are destined to become obsolescent. Six months later, everyone forgets the artist and the tune. It's become like a con job. Producers, engineers, lawyers and accountants all make money, but the artists don't. — Tony Bennett

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray. — Pope John Paul II

The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. — G.K. Chesterton

A nation that forgets its past has no future — Sir Winston Churchill

In order to be successful in any undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause. In proportion as one loses himself in this way, in the same degree does he get the highest happiness out of his work. — Booker T. Washington

If God gave Dad Alzheimer's, He's got to understand when Dad forgets what church he belongs to. — Joanne Fluke

A man wreaks harm because he forgets to love peace. He kills because of self-blinded fear, that imagines no other protection. — Janny Wurts

The waters of a river adapt themselves to whatever route proves possible, but never forgets its one objective: the sea. So fragile at its source, it gradually gathers the strength of the other rivers it encounters. And, after a certain point, its power is absolute — Paulo Coelho

What the mind forgets
The scars keep remembering — Edith L. Tiempo

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. — David McCullough

How often are the beauties of nature unheeded by man, who, musing on past ills, brooding over the possible calamities of the future, building castles in the air, or wrapped up in his own self-love and self-importance, forgets to look abroad, or looks with a vacant stare. — Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps

P5 - It is matter for wonder: the moment that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a specter to trouble the quiet of a later moment ... the beast(animals) ... forgets at once and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished forever. The beast lives unhistorically ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Envy is self-focused and self-righteous. It inserts you into the center of your world. It makes it all about you. It tells you that you deserve what you don't deserve. Envy is expectant and demanding. Envy tells you that you are someone you aren't and you are entitled to what is not rightfully yours. Envy cannot celebrate the blessing of another because it tells you that you are more deserving. Envy tells you that you have earned what you could never earn. The world of envy no more mixes with the world of grace than oil does with water. Envy forgets who you are, forgets who God is, and is confused about what life is all about. — Paul David Tripp

Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote, 'The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life'. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Julie Christie was absolutely amazing in Away From Her. Brilliant movie. It was the moving story of a woman who forgets her own husband. Hillary Clinton calls it the feel good movie of the year. — Jon Stewart

Some stories are easy to follow, and easy to tell. There is an introduction, a twist, and a happily-ever-after. And when telling the story, everyone forgets those small details, like that one quiet morning when the two of you woke wake up with the sunrise and talked about cookies. Or that night when she had her period, and the cramps were killing her, and she just needed your hug and something warm. — Andrea Tomic

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.
Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms. — Georges Bataille

The person who forgets the ultimate is a slave to the immediate. — John C. Maxwell

The grief changes over time. You keep busy. Sometimes your mind even forgets the pain for a little while. But when someone you love dies, there will always be a hurt inside you, like a splinter, and when you give yourself over to thinking on it, the ache comes back. — Colleen Houck

I won't say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind ... Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills towards causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy.
[ ... ]
I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was - deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness they way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode. — Terri Cheney