Tao Te Ching
Forget
Society tends to label forgetting as something bad but a more wise view may be seeing it as a useful tool.
Quotes (78)
“Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.”
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
“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.”
“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?”
“The first to apologize is the bravest, the first to forgive is the strongest, the first to forget is the happiest.”
“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.”
“if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”
“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.”
“When you forget about merit, your position is fulfilled… transmitting is merit but having transmitted, is not your own merit.”
“To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others.”
“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.”
“This verse explains how sages forget about words, embody the Tao, and change with the seasons.”
“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.”
“You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
“Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Fish don't drown in water, snow lions don't freeze in snow... so forget your worries and future plans.”
“we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor… No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.”
“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.”
“To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.”
“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.'”
“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.”
“A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”
“Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing is past or forgotten.”
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
“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”
“We soon forget whatever we have not thought about deeply, whatever is inspired by imitation or the passions of the moment which change and thereby modify our memory... society people remember almost nothing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it.”
“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.”
“You forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.”
“Children understand… All grown-ups were once children but only few of them remember it… I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them… Only the children know what they are looking for.”
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget and the reason a reader reads one is to remember.”
“We should forget, day by day, what we have done; this is true non-attachment. And we should do something new.”
“When we forget ourselves, we are the true activity of reality itself and there is no problem whatsoever in this world.”
“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”
“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.”
“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.”
“a good student is careful not to forget what he studied until after the test is taken”
“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.”
“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.”
“Immortality is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten... serious and in no way playful... a state of unrelieved theatricality... the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play. It is a life one cannot live.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you... Strike another match, go start anew.”
“Forget your troubles and dance! Forget your sorrows and dance! Forget your sickness and dance! Forget your weakness and dance!”
“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.”
“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade”
“People can forget what they should remember, and remember what by all rights and purposes they should forget. Especially when death approaches.”
“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
“Stop thinking about that shit. Some thoughts are poison. You can think them, but only when you've got the strength—or therapy... 'Til then? Right now? Close it off. Focus on right here and now.”
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