Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.

Mucha gente confunde una mala memoria con una conciencia limpia

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

"Mistakes" is easy to judge when other do it and difficult to realize when we do it.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events

But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.

Most errors in judgment happen when we don’t know we’re supposed to be exercising judgment.

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

Liars ought to have good memories.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.