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"But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting."
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"The mind is an instrument made up of universal consciousness, egocentric consciousness, societal consciousness, along with education, values, virtues, judgment and wisdom."

"If you want to understand the inner workings of the human mind, read good fiction."

"When you say to someone "follow your heart, it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain."

"All endeavors, heroic or monstrous, scientific or philosophical, rise from the electrochemical functioning of the mind, that takes place relentlessly in the little specks of protoplasm inside the head. These specks of jelly inside the brain, known as the neurons, determine our identity, personality and everything that we are."

"People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember."

"Thoughts are supreme. It is driving the car we call life. So to reach the deserved destination think right."

"Your skull encloses your brains. But never forget that anytime you open your mouth to talk, you have opened your mind for the entire world to see what is hidden in there!"
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."

"Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy."

"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself."

"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."

"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
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