#memo

The objective of learning is not necessarily to remember. It may even be salutary to forget. It is only when we forget the early pains and struggles of forming letters that we acquire the capacity for writing. The adult does not remember all the history s/he learned but s/he may hope to have acquired a standard of character and conduct, a sense of affairs and a feeling of change and development in culture. Naturally there is nothing against having a well-stocked mind provided it does not prevent the development of other capacities. But it is still more important to allow knowledge to sink into one in such a way that it becomes fruitful for life; this best done when we feel deeply all we learn. For the life of feeling is less conscious, more dream-like, than intellectual activity and leads to the subconscious life of will where the deep creative capacities of humanity have their being. It is from this sphere that knowledge can emerge again as something deeply significant for life. It is not what we remember exactly, but what we transform which is of real value to our lives. In this transformation the process of forgetting, of allowing subjects to sink into the unconscious before "re-membering" them is an important element. ↗

— Henning Hansmann

#education #feeling #forgetting #learning #memory

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. ↗

— Barack Obama

#nature

The man went to the controls, looking up at me, flaring his nostrils to my actions. His voice was like a voice under water. “We’ll see what becomes of your rebellious nature when you lose your memories, Rei Lin.” He punched a few buttons and turned the knob on the wall to the right. ↗

— Millicent Ashby

#saain #nature

[...] the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. ↗

— Noam Shpancer

#psychology #nature

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm. ↗

— Jason Najum

#essay #memoir #pop-culture #relationship

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#religion #religion

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#ideas #memoir #memory #religion #religion

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#history-religion-terrorism #literary #memoir #religion

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything. ↗

— Henry Hazlitt

#knowing #memory #practice #science

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#injuries #memory #past #reality #scars