The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.

How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted to the same person?

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?