Quotes & Sayings About Remembering And Forgetting

To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential. — Adolf Hitler

The good and the beautiful is not forgotten; it lives in legend and in song. — Hans Christian Andersen

The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.) — Laurie Halse Anderson

Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). — Jonathan Safran Foer

The quick ticket to ecstasy is to catch yourself feeling in a very low state of mind
depressed, stupid, hateful
and to love yourself for feeling that way. When you do that you can experience a rocket ride right to the top. Love does not take time; it's possible to transform depression into ecstasy in a flash. But please do not accept my word for it. Try it as an experiment next time you are feeling low.
Something else to consider is that we will always be in the process of remembering how to love ourselves, then forgetting, then remembering again. It does not seem to be our destiny to be any one way all the time. So let's get used to being pendulums and enjoy the ride. — Gay Hendricks

Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favorite song that you knew by heart. It's like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a television show you watched for years. It's something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there's an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can't rest until I know the answers. — Cecelia Ahern

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better. — Samuel Butler

The art of reading consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting non essentials. — Adolf Hitler

I don't like the memories because the tears come easily, and once again I break my promise to myself for this day. It's a constant battle. a war between remembering and forgetting. — E. E. Cummings

But the only thing worse than remembering the feel of Rose in his arms, the softness of her black and white feathers, the sound of her voice when she sang quietly to herself, would be forgetting it. — Melissa Grey

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. — Gary Wolf

Despair IS the greatest sin,' Dr. Nuttham finally responded slowly. 'It involves forgetting that God is there. Forgetting that He is good and that all He is and does eXtends from and works toward this perfect goodness. That doesn't mean that He allows evil, or creates it, or perpetuates it. That's our entwinement. Rather, He uses even our evil toward His good. We all need forms of remembering this first great love ... writing, reading, creating, BEING. — Carolyn Weber

I tried to explain again. 'Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favourite song that you knew off by heart. It's like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a group who sang a famous song. It's something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there's an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can't rest until I know the answer.'
'I Understand,' he said softly. — Cecelia Ahern

Servants must be big people. Big enough to go on, remembering the right and forgetting the wrong. — Charles R. Swindoll

In some respects supermarket apples represent a kind of collective forgetting - of flavors, textures, and aromas, of landscapes and foliage. Forgetting can be far more difficult to study than remembering, because its traces are much harder to discern. — Jennifer A. Jordan

Forgetting and remembering are governed by laws, but we cannot find out what they are. — Mason Cooley

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them. — Leslie Marmon Silko

. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn
to be erased, for one final atonement
finite and forgetting and whole - but time in its preserving
will not permit forgetting; destroying
only when we can no longer beg
or argue with time
to preserve the brief benisons
a few moments longer than our sins — John Daniel Thieme

Only one thing's sadder than remembering you were once free, and that's forgetting you were once free. — Leonard Peltier

The irony of life
Is our greatest fear is to forget,
Yet it's the only certain fate
That anything has ever met.
We know one day our earth
Will find itself victim to time,
That nothing will be left
To tell of your story or mine,
And still through life we rush
Scrambling for something to remember,
Perish the thought that ash be ash
And not the memory of an ember. — Erin Hanson

It seems like it's all just remembering and forgetting. Things happen so fast, and then they're gone before you notice them. Events ambush you from out of nowhere, blindside you, and then you have to spend the time afterward trying to remember or forget what the hell it all was to begin with. The more you think about it, the more the events crumble, crack, breakdown, or refuse to change at all. They're either pieces of ice in your hand, changing shape and melting away until they're nothing like what they were to begin with, or pieces of glass. Sharp and irritating, unchanging reminders of pain and unpleasantness - or happiness. — Gregory Galloway

It's been a year. It's been a really hard year without you. Losing you felt like jumping off the bridge and forgetting which way was up. I don't think I'll ever be over it, but I'm starting to find my way through it. Mom said when a person dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get through it by remembering. I've been remembering everything lately. — Courtney C. Stevens

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. — Jeanette Winterson

Or perhaps the truth was that there is
no Fate, no pattern, nothing at all except a tired man looking back and forgetting everything but this
and that detail which the very act of memory composes into a fate. Eschenburg, remembering his
childhood, wondered whether Fate was merely a form of forgetfulness. — Steven Millhauser

Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn't quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember. — Michael Pollan

Shit," he breathed against her lips. "I've been wanting to do this since I first tasted you in the prey room." The reminder that he'd tossed her into a cold, dank dungeon and then scared her to death should have put a damper on things, but it didn't. She was so stressed out, so tired of not knowing if she was going to live or die - she couldn't help but embrace these few precious moments of forgetting the hell that was her life and remembering what it was like to actually live. Boldly, she ran her hands up Riker's arms, letting her fingers map the rough scars and thick veins that wound around his biceps. — Larissa Ione

The trick of functioning with grief is that of remembering and forgetting all at once. Of letting the ghost walk at your side but not block the way. — Jack Ketchum

Forgiving is not forgetting. It is remembering and letting go. — Claudia Black

Friendship consists in forgetting; what one gives, and remembering what one receives. — Alexandre Dumas

When we think of fear as an acronym meant to support us, we find that fear itself has genius, magic and power in it. We can use any fear that we feel to our advantage in the moment by remembering what FEAR really is: Forgetting Everything is All Right. — Lori Cash Richards

Grace surrounds us and holds us like the sky holds everything in it ... and as soon as I find a way to let go of my story, I keep seeing over and over again that grace is always here and it includes the forgetting and the remembering. The practice is the opening of the hand to catch the raindrops, which are always falling. If you don't open your hand, you get wet, but you don't get much to drink. — Krishna Das

I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees' lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human. — Sue Hubbell

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. — James Baldwin

Forgetting is not easy, but remembering is worse. — Nurilla Iryani

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008) — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly. — Amy Zhang

You have not forgotten to remember;
You have remembered to forget.
But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember - and generally more practical. — Idries Shah

The problem with me is that I cannot focus when she is on my mind. I can't. I probably will make a mistake when writing that paper and will start writing everything I feel about her - the professor will be very happy with that, I am sure. Oh well, such is my life. I guess I've been attempting my best to forget her for several weeks now. But even in that act of forgetting her, I am remembering her. I am recollecting her and recreating her in my mind. And that's where everything falls apart. In remembering her, I remember her goodness. In remembering her, I remember her weaknesses and my own. In remembering her, I am remembering myself. Out of that dark cave of mine, I call myself out. And then all of the remembering starts again. I doodle, I twitch, I aim restlessly for some unseen goal. And then my thoughts drift to you.
I'll let them stay there for now. Just for a minute.
Or two. — Moses Y. Mikheyev

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering
remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened. — Desmond Tutu

We gonna be a family again in Heaven. It takes some strong patience, but the Lord will come through. And as long as we here, we can get on living by never forgetting. Never forgetting and always remembering. — Andrew Galasetti

Take without forgetting, and give without remembering. — Bryant H. McGill

What's the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died. — Shalom Auslander

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. — Ron Rash

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting. — Ann Brashares

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. — Walter Benjamin

Journaling is the difference between learning and remembering. It's also the difference between forgetting and fulfilling our goals. — Mark Batterson

That's the blessing and the curse of loss: You don't get to choose what falls within the inevitable dissolution of recollection or what lingers and haunts you late at night, your head heavy with memories, while your husband dreams of scaling walls in spandex tights.This is who I am: someone who simultaneously longs for and fears the commitment of remembering. There is the forgetting, the disintegration of memory, morsel by morsel; and there is the impossibility of forgetting, the scar tissue, with is insulated layers of padding. Both haunt me in their own way. — Julie Buxbaum

To look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography. — P.D. James

This stunning act of humble love resulted not from Jesus's forgetting who he was but from remembering who he was. This was the holy mission of the Son Savior. He had to be willing to enter the lowest human condition, to do the most debased thing, and to let go of his rights of position in order that we might be redeemed. It was a high and holy calling, and it was the only way. — Paul David Tripp

I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember. — Kevin Brockmeier

Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting. — Brian Tracy

Sometimes one has to know something many times over. Sometimes one forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets, and then remembers. And then forgets again. — Maggie Nelson

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting? — Elise M. Boulding

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting. — Elizabeth Bibesco

She found the book tucked at the edge of a shelf in the room where she sleeps, and it is thick with pages and words and characters, and reading helps Jinhua to remember and it helps her to forget--and it has been such a long, long time since she has held a book in her hands. When she is not reading Jinhua is sad... — Alexandra Curry

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again. — John Gray

They were a delicious bunch but always forgetting the sensible things like food and daylight and remembering only the more intoxicating ones like love and gin. — Rachel Joyce

Worship is forgetting about what's wrong with you and remembering what's right with God. — Mark Batterson

But then comes a time when forgetting isn't possible. And I do mean a particular time when no amount of dreaming, not then and maybe not ever, can change how naked and unimportant we become in our own eyes. — Stig Dagerman

Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us. — Paul Tillich

Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing he had found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not. Later, when things were difficult for me with my work and I felt that I had lost or turned away from something I couldn't even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance ... in fact, there were more than two chances-many more. I know, after fifty years that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning never stops. — Jeanette Winterson