Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.

There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.

And we forget because we must

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day — that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.

Often in life we forget the things we should remember and remember the things we should forget.

We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.

I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

If I forgot what I have not been, I would forget myself.

And we forget because we must
And not because we will

Matthew Arnold, ‘Absence’ (1852)