Top 100 Quotes About Forgetfulness
#1. I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.
Annie Dillard
#2. The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.
Vera Nazarian
#3. Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.
Bernard Taylor
#4. Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#5. With all the lines I have to learn for TV scripts, I don't think I have any problems with forgetfulness - that's brain exercise enough for me.
Kevin Whately
#6. Forgetfulness is the catalytic germ of spontaneous creativity
Howard Marks
#8. Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.
Erich Maria Remarque
#9. Wine maketh the band quivering, the eye watery, the night unquiet, lewd dreams, a stinking breath in the morning, and an utter forgetfulness of all things.
Pliny The Elder
#10. Erase those negative tapes playing in your head. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you forget. He can cast your hurt in forgetfulness.
Bidemi Mark-Mordi
#11. And still the mad magnificent herald Spring assembles beauty from forgetfulness with the wild trump of April:witchery of sound and odour drives the wingless thing man forth in the bright air ...
E. E. Cummings
#12. Do good when you remember, and what you forget will be revealed to you; and do not surrender your mind to blind forgetfulness.
Syncletica Of Alexandria
#13. Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.
Richard Brautigan
#16. The devil doesn't fill us with hatred for God, but with forgetfulness of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#17. But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
Mark Twain
#18. Remorse presupposes enough self-forgetfulness to feel the pain ofothers.
Helen Prejean
#19. Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away ... and forgiveness descends.
Julian Barnes
#20. Rest assured it is harder to know how to be full than it is to know how to be hungry-so desperate is the tendency of human nature to pride and forgetfulness of God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#21. I want now to be of today. It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.
Mary Antin
#22. There is a noble forgetfulness-that which does not remember injuries.
Charles Simmons
#23. If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.
Elie Wiesel
#24. The word 'sin' is beautiful; it comes from a root which means 'forgetfulness'. You may not be able to see the connection between forgetfulness and sin, but there IS a connection: forgetfulness means unawareness, unconsciousness.
Rajneesh
#25. Forgetfulness can sometimes bring freedom of a sort
Neil Gaiman
#26. A man stays alive as long as he is remembered.
He is killed only by forgetfulness.
Richard Basehart
#27. The living being is in the state of forgetfulness of his relation with God due to his being overly attracted to material sense gratification from time immemorial.
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
#28. O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
William Shakespeare
#29. Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.
Joseph Joubert
#30. None in this age will amass wealth except those having five traits ofcharacter. High hopes; abnormal greediness; excessive miserliness, lack of fearing Allaah; and forgetfulness of the coming world.
Sufyan Al-Thawri
#32. Much as oblivion is the death of sorrow
So death is life's forgetfulness
Mihai Eminescu
#33. The author emphasizes the importance of self-forgetfulness when his statistics were marred by a bad outing. He forgot all of that outing to such an extent that he quipped, What was my name?
Jim Bouton
#34. Death is for a long time. Those of shallow thought say that it is forever. There is, at least, a long night of it. There is the forgetfulness and the loss of identity. The spirit, even as the body, is unstrung and burst and scattered. One goes down to death, and it leaves a mark on one forever.
R.A. Lafferty
#35. A sense of security, a feeling that a truce was established between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its structure peculiarly susceptible.
Mary Shelley
#36. To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.
Joseph Priestley
#37. Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
James Carroll
#38. At the age of 46, forgetfulness & confusion had become a daily aspect of life.
Steven Magee
#39. He liked being in a place where everything from forgetfulness to homicide might be blamed on the heat.
Jan Karon
#40. There is a sad forgetfulness of Christian modesty, especially in the life and dress of women.
Alice Von Hildebrand
#41. Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good.
Valerie Solanas
#42. I told you not to confuse forgetfulness with stupidity," Allen said. "She's extremely intelligent. Did you use the audio binder? Give her the Amneoset?
Kim Harrison
#43. One should hate very little, because it's extremely fatiguing. One should despise much, forgive often and never forget. Pardon does not bring with it forgetfulness; at least not for me.
Sarah Bernhardt
#44. But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.
John Verdon
#45. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
Thomas Mann
#46. We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
Alexander Smith
#47. True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.
C.S. Lewis
#48. There are three influences which appear to Us to have the chief place in effecting this downgrade movement of society. These are-first, the distaste for a simple and laborious life; secondly, repugnance to suffering of any kind; thirdly, the forgetfulness of the future life.
Pope Leo XIII
#49. We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Angela Davis
#50. He did not seek to efface pain in forgetfulness, he sought to elevate it and to dignify it with hope. He would say, "Be careful how you turn to the dead. Don't think of the rotting. Hold your gaze and you will see the living light of your dearly loved departed up above in heaven.
Victor Hugo
#51. I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.
Eduardo Galeano
#52. I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
Joy Harjo
#53. Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption.
Baal Shem Tov
#54. When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.
Ben Okri
#55. He could find no answer, except life's usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is, find forgetfulness. He
Leo Tolstoy
#56. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
Oscar Wilde
#57. If there is pain, use it as an awareness, as meditation, as a sharpening of the soul. And when pleasure is there, use it as a droning, as a forgetfulness. Both are ways to reach God. One is to remember yourself totally, and one is to forget yourself totally.
Rajneesh
#58. Ah, now, don't cry over lost years and forgetfulness. The tales tell what they can. The rest is for us to learn..
Shannon Hale
#59. How grateful we should be that a wise Creator fashioned an earth and placed us here, with a veil of forgetfulness of our previous existence so that we might experience a time of testing, an opportunity to prove ourselves in order to qualify for all that God has prepared for us to receive.
Thomas S. Monson
#60. If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.
Arthur Machen
#62. All she felt was mind-numbing exhaustion, and a desperate yearning for the sweet forgetfulness of sleep.
William Lavender
#63. My mother sang me a lullaby,
my mother had not slept for a while,
her hands the same: craggy and agile.
the wooden ceiling emanated the same tie:
sulky fumes of disdain.
We were never given to forgetfulness,
We were occupied.
Ashfaq Saraf
#64. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
#65. There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.
Helen Keller
#66. We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.
Fritz Leiber
#67. Let us chide ourselves for past forgetfulness, and pray for grace ever to bear Him in fondest remembrance. Lord, paint upon the eyeballs of my soul the image of Thy Son.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#68. I much condole with you on your late loss ... pains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;
Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.
Erasmus Darwin
#69. Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.
Ivo Andric
#70. What is a man's life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.
Lisa M. Klein
#71. In this world we are in precarious position, balanced midway between material and spiritual hungers. We find heaven to be a delicate state of consciousness that can be lost in a single moment of forgetfulness.
Harold Klemp
#72. Seek silence in the midst of the tumult, seek solitude in the masses, light in the midst of darkness; find forgetfulness in injury, victory in the midst of despondence, and courage in the midst of alarm, resistance in the midst of temptation, peace in the midst of war.
Michael Molinos
#73. Zen is not "attained" by mirror-wiping mediation, but by "self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now." We do not "come", we "are." Don't strive to become, but be.
Bruce Lee
#74. The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.
Cesar Aira
#75. Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: "I did not know that fellow was a poet." And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#76. I have never seen such extreme partisanship, such bitter partisanship, and such forgetfulness of the fate of our fathers and of the Constitution.
Robert Byrd
#77. Forgiveness: best for cleansing. Forgetfulness best for repetition.
Soul Dancer
#78. Keeping a [journal] need not be a major chore-just a few minutes of notes each day can be valuable. Writing crystallizes insights, fools the defense of forgetfulness, and builds a collection of ideas and reflections that can spur further insights even years later.
Roger N. Walsh
#79. I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead; the living have no right to forget.
Chaim Herzog
#80. Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, "There is joy in self-forgetfulness.
Helen Keller
#81. Remembrance is a form of meeting.
Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.
Kahlil Gibran
#82. This is gospel-humility, blessed self-forgetfulness. Not thinking less of myself as in modern cultures, or less of myself as in traditional cultures. Simply thinking of myself less.
Timothy Keller
#83. A baby is expected. A trip is expected. News is expected. Forgetfulness is expected. An invitation is expected. Hope is expected. But memories are not expected. They just come.
Giannina Braschi
#84. What sound does forgetfulness make?' She hardly had to think. 'It's the sound of the wind in dead grasses on a hot summer's day.
Terry Pratchett
#85. As far as I'm concerned it's the other way round. We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free.
Margot Livesey
#86. Forgetfulness of grief I yet may gain;In some wise may come ending to my pain;It may be yet the Gods will have me glad!Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!
William Morris
#87. Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.
Jose Saramago
#88. Though we live amid promiscuous pressures, spiritual clutter and forgetfulness, we probably still value the integrity of life.
Baker Brownell
#89. Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.
John Muir
#90. What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.
Zane Grey
#91. Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible.
Romare Bearden
#92. Forgetfulness is not to be purchased with a wish; and I cannot bestow my esteem on all who desire it, unless they deserve it too.
Anne Bronte
#93. Humility is constant forgetfulness of one's achievements.
John Climacus
#95. The alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. They will trust the written characters and not remember themselves.
Socrates
#96. Mindfulness frees us of forgetfulness and dispersion and makes it possible to live fully each minute of life. Mindfulness enables us to live.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#97. Can the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact ... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes.
Michel De Certeau
#98. May we awaken from forgetfulness and realize our true home.
Nhat Hanh
#99. Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
Yann Martel
#100. Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory
James Stephens
