Forgetfulness Quotes - Page 9

• Gaiety is forgetfulness of the self, melancholy is memory of the self: in that state the soul feels all the power of its roots, nothing distracts it from its profound homeland and the look that it casts upon the outer world is gently dismayed.

  Adrienne Monnier

  Memories, Self, Roots

  Adrienne Monnier (1976). “The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier”, p.245, U of Nebraska Press

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• My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die. ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother.

  Isabel Allende

  Memories, Writing, Grandmother

  Isabel Allende, John Rodden (2004). “Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition”, p.55, University of Texas Press

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• But what after all, behind appearances, is this seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would be sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally struggles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely selfconscious, free, infinite, immortal.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Self, Growth, Giants

  "The Life Divine: Art of living".

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• 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

  Eye, Light, Self

  Helen Keller (2015). “The Story of My Life: Top Biography”, p.72, 谷月社

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• 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

  Greatness, Magic, Use

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• Spiritual realization is theoretically the easiest thing and in practice the most difficult thing there is. It is the easiest because it is enough to think of God. It is the most difficult because human nature is forgetfulness of God.

  Frithjof Schuon

  Spiritual, Thinking, Practice

  Frithjof Schuon, James S. Cutsinger (2004). “Prayer Fashions Man: Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life”, p.179, World Wisdom, Inc

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• In the beginning, passion and pain were not created together with the body; nor forgetfulness and ignorance together with the soul; nor the ever-changing impressions in the shape of events with the mind. All these things were brought about in man by his disobedience.

  Maximus the Confessor

  God, Truth, Pain

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• Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

  James Carroll

  Memories, Political, Tyranny

  James Carroll (2013). “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War”, p.13, Metropolitan Books

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• The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

  Socrates

  Memories, Writing, Character

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• As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness.

  J. Budziszewski

  Children, Editors, Names

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• [My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.

  Simon Norfolk

  Memories, Axes, Law

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• 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

  Technology, Cities, Process

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• Humility is the forgetfulness of self.

  Thomas Keating

  Humility, Self

  Thomas Keating (2002). “Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel”, p.72, A&C Black

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• Holiness consists in doing God’s will joyfully. Faithfulness makes saints. The spiritual life is a union with Jesus: the divine and the human giving themselves to each other. The only thing Jesus asks of us is to give ourselves to him, in total poverty and total self-forgetfulness.

  Mother Teresa

  Spiritual, Jesus, Self

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• 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

  Lying, Philosophical, Self

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• Why, when the world gets to understand about it I expect that two men or two women, or a man and a woman, will come in here, and say to me, 'We have quarrelled and outraged each other, we have injured our friend, our wife, our husband; we regret, we would forgive, but we cannot, because we remember. Put between us the atonement of forgetfulness, that we may love each other as of old.'

  Edward Bellamy

  Husband, Regret, Men

  "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process". Book by Edward Bellamy. Chapter 11, 1880.

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• That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low order of man, that which constitutes human goodness, human nobleness, is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right.

  James Anthony Froude

  Sacrifice, Men, Self

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 534, 1895.

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• The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Ignorance, Defects, Habitual

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.214, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Loss, Night, Long

  "Space Chantey" by R. A. Lafferty, (Ch. 2), 1968.

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• My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly - and worse - of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

  John Constable

  Art, Sunshine, Darkness

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), "John Constable's Correspondence," ed. R.B. Beckett, vol. 3, p. 122, 1962-1970.

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• life's best balm - Forgetfulness!

  Felicia Hemans

  Forget

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• Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away,and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.

  Samuel Johnson

  Ideas, Remembrance, Mind

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

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• Turn your eyes whither you will, enter into whatever temple you please, you will find there on the very threshold Prophecy and Sacrament .... whoever despises these two things, infallibly bends towards earth, knowing nothing of God but his name, and holding with him no other relations than ingratitude and forgetfulness.

  Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

  Eye, Knowing Nothing, Names

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• The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

  John Piper

  Greatness, Self, Joy

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• Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.

  John Muir

  Nature, Morning, Sleep

  John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979). “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir”, p.235, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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