A Quote by Nelson Rodrigues

Memory is a swindler, a forger emeritus of facts and figures.

Nelson Rodrigues

Quote Topics

Facts Figures Memory

Quote Author

Nelson Rodrigues
Brazilian - Novelist
August 23, 1912 - December 21, 1980

Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.

Sydney Smith

Memory isn't the facts, it's just a record you keep to yourself. With the facts, memory is useless.

Guy Pearce

I worked hard at memorizing lists of facts and figures, and carried with me a book of facts.

Charles Van Doren

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

Patrick Kavanagh

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

David Byrne

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Thomas Merton

In science one must search for ideas. If there are no ideas, there is no science. A knowledge of facts is only valuable in so far as facts conceal ideas: facts without ideas are just the sweepings of the brain and the memory.

Vissarion Belinsky

[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.

Robert Watson-Watt

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.