Top 120 Joshua Foer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.”

— Joshua Foer

2. “One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we’re idling in front of our computer screens.”

— Joshua Foer

Featured in: Procrastination Quotes

3. “One trick, known as the journey method or ‘memory palace,’ is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind’s eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.”

— Joshua Foer

4. “Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.”

— Joshua Foer

5. “If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.”

— Joshua Foer

6. “When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.”

— Joshua Foer

7. “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear.”

— Joshua Foer

8. “Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.”

— Joshua Foer

9. “The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.”

— Joshua Foer

10. “What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.”

— Joshua Foer

11. “To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.”

— Joshua Foer

12. “Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.”

— Joshua Foer

13. “You work now so you can rest later,” he told the student. “You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later.”

— Joshua Foer

14. “Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.”

— Joshua Foer

15. “The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.”

— Joshua Foer

16. “Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.”

— Joshua Foer

17. “Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and a when attached to them. Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge.”

— Joshua Foer

18. “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.”

— Joshua Foer

19. “We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.”

— Joshua Foer

20. “The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.”

— Joshua Foer

21. “Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.”

— Joshua Foer

22. “A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.”

— Joshua Foer

23. “Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.”

— Joshua Foer

24. “We’ve outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us.”

— Joshua Foer

25. “What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.”

— Joshua Foer

26. “As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.”

— Joshua Foer

27. “Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.”

— Joshua Foer

28. “If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn’t just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.”

— Joshua Foer

Featured in: Reading Quotes

29. “Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.”

— Joshua Foer

30. “Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces.”

— Joshua Foer

31. “He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. “I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,” he writes.”

— Joshua Foer

32. “Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that’s not the same thing as wisdom.”

— Joshua Foer

33. “When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance.”

— Joshua Foer

34. “Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.”

— Joshua Foer

35. “Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.”

— Joshua Foer

36. “Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.”

— Joshua Foer

37. “With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.”

— Joshua Foer

38. “Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.”

— Joshua Foer

39. “Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it’s also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.”

— Joshua Foer

40. “All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn’t know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.”

— Joshua Foer

41. “How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we’re not willing to process deeply?”

— Joshua Foer

42. “Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.”

— Joshua Foer

43. “The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.”

— Joshua Foer

44. “Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.”

— Joshua Foer

45. “Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I’d sometimes take the Q train all the way out to Coney Island and back, and work on my laptop. There’s something about pushy New Yorkers looking over your shoulder that really makes you produce sentences.”

— Joshua Foer

46. “Sequencing – the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader – matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.”

— Joshua Foer

47. “Junk food in: junk brain. Healthy food in: healthy brain,” he said.”

— Joshua Foer

48. “This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning.”

— Joshua Foer

49. “I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I’m ashamed to admit that I still can’t read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.”

— Joshua Foer

50. “The best memorizers in the world – who almost all hail from Europe – can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the ‘four-minute mile of memory.’”

— Joshua Foer