Forgetting Quotes

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

memory

Forgetting is the cost
Of living cheerfully.

My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I've learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

People forget years and remember moments.

years

The crime of loving is forgetting.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it.

the past

After a few days, the affair began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

Forgotten is forgiven.

forgiveness

I shall go the way of the open sea,
To the lands I knew before you came.
And the cool clean breezes shall blow from me
the memory of your name.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

originality

To be able to forget means sanity.  Incessantly to remember means obsession, lunacy.

Forgetfulness transforms every occurrence into a non-occurrence.

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.