Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono’s line has the sly precision of a psychologist who’s tired of us treating memory like a filing cabinet. He frames an event not as a cleanly finished unit of time, but as something that tries - and fails - to erase itself. “Does not completely unhappen” is the tell: it smuggles in the idea that experience has a residue, a stain, a half-life. Memory isn’t a replay; it’s the evidence that the past is still doing work in the present.

The intent feels characteristically de Bono: to nudge readers out of passive, “received” thinking and into noticing how cognition actually behaves. An “unhappened” event would be perfectly neutralized, leaving no trace in mood, expectation, reflex, or story. Real life doesn’t grant that. We keep partial imprints: the body remembers embarrassment before the mind names it; a smell edits your afternoon without asking permission; a single conversation becomes a template you reuse on strangers.

Subtextually, the quote also pokes at the fantasy of closure. We like to imagine we can wrap experience, label it, and shelve it. De Bono suggests the opposite: what we call memory is the unfinished business of events. That’s why it “works” as a sentence - it makes forgetting the default aspiration, then reveals how often it fails.

In context, coming from a psychologist known for “lateral thinking,” it reads as a compact manifesto: if the past won’t fully unhappen, then our job is to learn how to handle the leftovers - to reframe them, redirect them, and stop mistaking their persistence for objective truth.