bible and theology on Absent-Mindedness

G.K. Chesterton’s mind was so preoccupied that he frequently forgot to keep appointments. He relied on his wife in all practical matters. Once on a lecture tour he sent her the following telegram: “Am...

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

Be not only attentive in hearing, but retentive after hearing.

In Scripture, remembering falsely or forgetting entirely is often associated with an absence of gratitude. One of the saddest judgments passed on people in Scripture is that they didn’t remember God’s...

One of humanity’s problems is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness can happen at multiple levels, from a simple problem of recall to a posture of hard-heartedness and disobedience toward the command-giver. Wh...

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A slothful man may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly...

We spend the whole of our whole lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished/

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with th...

[Describing many of his friends] Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach...

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

Gracious God, forgive us for when we fail to recognize the destructive power of mental illness. Every day we are surrounded by people with real emotional and mental difficulties that we ignore. We con...

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.

Several times during the day, but especially in the morning and evening, ask yourself for a moment if you have your soul in your hands or if some passion or fit of anxiety has robbed you of it.... If ...

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prin...