#forgetfulness

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion. ↗

I never forget things. I just don't observe them in the first place. ↗

Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life’s shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way…Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, ‘there is joy is self-forgetfulness.’ So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others; ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness. ↗

— Helen Keller

#gratitude #joy #nature #self-forgetfulness #suffering

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive. ↗

— Jessamyn West

#alive #barriers #between #communication #elders

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#body #constraints #forgetfulness #freedom #lethe

There is some pleasure even in words, when they bring forgetfulness of present miseries. ↗

— Sophocles

#even #forgetfulness #miseries #pleasure #present

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death. ↗

— Zane Grey

#blood #cold #dark #death #embrace

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#bitterness #forgetfulness #anger

Forgetfulness is a form of freedom. ↗