Skip to content

Ability Quotes by Joshua Foer

5 Ability quotes by Joshua Foer

All Ability quotes Joshua Foer’s page

Ability isn’t just raw talent; it’s a habit you can train. Joshua Foer, the memory‑athlete turned author, breaks down the mental tricks he uses to stretch his capacity, why practice beats instinct, and how ordinary people can push past perceived limits.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the…

Image

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind…

Image

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and…

Image

Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need…

Image

Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in…

Image

Other authors on Ability

More by Joshua Foer

Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of…

Image

“I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and…

Image

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

Image

“We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.”

Image

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,…

Image

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention…

Image

“I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies…

Image

The 'OK Plateau' is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might…

Image

“One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

Image

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words…

Image

Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and…

Image

“Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human.”

Image

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…

Image

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

Image

“As the historian Jocelyn Penny Small pointed out, GODISNOWHERE comes out a lot differently when rendered as GOD IS NOW HERE versus GOD IS…

Image