Tao Te Ching
Student’s Memory Book
Memory
One of the biggest problems with politics is the necessity of putting large and complex problems into tiny conceptual boxes. Word-boxes that are easy to remember as a slogan but inevitably far from the original meaning and inspiration. The larger the political organization, the more complete this trivializing and narrowing process becomes. Wherever our religious, scientific, philosophical, or political belief system fits in the world, the more solidly we believe in it, the further we abandon truth. Memory is one of the strongest reinforcements in this process. While memory became an essential tool of civilization, it all too easily becomes an unforgiving slave master. Because our experiences are so complicated, we need to forget in order to act creatively. A major problem in forgetting though is forgetting that we forgot so much and becoming arrogant.
In a more personal way, memories easily attach to objects. When we see an object, either consciously or unconsciously we tend to remember the circumstances around it: who it came from, how we feel about them, what we did to get it, or other events it became a part of. And these connections effect our mood and state of mind. If the objects (or people) represent something negative, each time we see them it effects us in a negative way. And the same way for positive associations. By creating and surrounding ourselves with good-memory-attached objects, places, and people, we can help ourselves stay in good moods with optimistic attitudes.
Quotes (86)
“Meanwhile let us two, here in the hut, over our food and wine, regale ourselves with the unhappy memories that each can recall. For a man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far can enjoy even his sufferings after a time.”
“Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.”
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
“They will say I have no sense of what befits my age but they will be wrong. It's a happy thing to forget one's age. The gods have drawn no distinction between young and old, which should dance and which should not.”
“Yet is it more honorable, and just, and upright, and pleasing, to treasure in the memory good acts than bad.”
“The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words, so that I can talk to him?”
“when there is excellence of character, physical appearance is forgotten. When people do not forget what to forget, but forget what not to forget, this is really forgetting.”
“Who is more fortunate, the man who loses his memory and forgets all his worries or the one who doesn’t forget and suffers his worries all the time?”
“I am like one of those old books that ends up moldering for lack of having been read. There's nothing to do but spin out the thread of memory and—from time to time—wipe away the dust building up there.”
“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.”
“unless students can forget the teacher, their vision will be obscured.”
“the wine is being pressed
I'll have enough to drink
to drown bad memories and help
fend off unhappy thoughts”
“In my cottage in the wood, I read my books, dream and think.
Love o'er all the past I brood and the present with it link.”
“But O ye lovers, bathed in bliss always, recall the griefs gone by of other days… forgetting not that ye have felt yourselves Love’s power to displease, lest ye might win Love’s prize with too great ease.”
“Whoever refers to authorities in disputing ideas works with his memory rather than with his reason.”
“In a discussion, when someone cites an authority, they are using memory, not reason.”
“Once we forget form, our self becomes empty. Once our self is empty, nothing can harm us. Once there is no self, there is no life. How then could there be any death?”
“Remember to forget. The things we remember best are those better forgotten… Very often the only remedy for the trouble is to forget it, and all we forget is the remedy.”
“The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.”
“I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.”
“Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
“conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth... Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry... Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes the men's temper governs them;”
“pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion”
“there is nothing higher or stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in after years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home... if we have only one good memory left in our hearts, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
“You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your 'friends.'”
“It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.”
“To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.”
“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.”
“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good thing for the first time.”
“A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”
“When we remember that some of the best and noblest men that ever lived have been reviled, indicted, and executed by so-called good men, how can we believe stories that revile and discredit anyone?”
“Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing is past or forgotten.”
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
“In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the collective creation—the truth of immortality.”
“Islands of memory begin to rise above the river life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.”
“Voluntary memory—the memory of the intellect and the eyes—[gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures of bad painters resemble the spring... So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it”
“All other memories of travels, people, and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings... Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared... bouts with the unconscious are indelibly engraved upon my memory; everything else has lost importance”
“He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.”
“There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood… It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.”
“The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.”
“It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.”
“Morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.”
“More than wine or love, more underhandedly than ideas, art is able to entice man and make him forget. Art takes the place of duty; it fights to convert the ephemeral into the eternal and to transubstantiate man's suffering into beauty... Art makes us scorn the petty everyday concern for food, and even for justice; we forget that this is the root which nourishes the immortal flower.”
“New material no longer seems to find room, and recent impressions fade as rapidly as a politician's promises, or the public's memory of them... The ability to learn decreases with each decade of our lives, as if the association fibers of the brain were accumulated and overlaid in inflexible patterns.”
“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”
“Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—”
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget and the reason a reader reads one is to remember.”
“Forget everything and discover something quite new and different moment after moment... As long as we have some definite idea about the past or some hope in the future, we cannot be serious with the moment that exists right now.”
“When we forget ourselves, we are the true activity of reality itself and there is no problem whatsoever in this world.”
“Happy is the person who knows what to remember of the past, what to enjoy in the present, and what to plan for in the future”
“We all have our own personality, unique and distinctive; and at the same time, this distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory”
“Most people, when they reach a certain age, let down and talk about what they used to do. Well, who gives a damn about what you used to do? It's what you're doing now.”
“After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.”
“don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else.”
“There are three side effects of LSD: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.”
“To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.”
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“I heard a definition once: ‘Happiness is health and a short memory!’ I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.”
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to.”
“there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable... A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.”
“There is a humiliating memory at the bottom of all serious conflicts... it is only by remembering what we have forgotten that we an enter into competition with sufficient intensity”
“Sometimes I wish I could forget more things. I have to make a conscious effort to free my mind, open it again, because memory can be tremendously rapacious.”
“If you have a knot in your past that stops the flow of your life, it’s a psychic impediment. Your memories enlarge in ways proportionally to how willing you are to allow them to enlarge.”
“The ones who did it always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did… But the surviving victims can never forget… That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
“Memory can give warmth to time. And art can—when it goes well—give shape to that memory, even fix it in history. Much as van Gogh inscribed the figure of a country mailman on our collective memory so well that he lives on, even today.”
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