memory

1.

It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.

- Will, George F.

2.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

- Benjamin, Walter

3.

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

- Updike, John

4.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

- Diderot, Denis

5.

... I remember you and recall you without effort, without exercise of will; that is, by natural impulse, indicated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth the having. When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy -- that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

- Fairbanks, Douglas

6.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.

- Fermi, Enrico

7.

We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

- Milan Kundera

8.

Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

- Kaplan, Justin

9.

Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age.

- Firmianus, Lactantius

10.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

11.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

12.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

- Fadiman, Clifton

13.

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.

- Wynne-Tyson, Jon

14.

Everyone complains of the badness of his memory, but nobody of his judgment.

- La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

15.

Those who cannot remember the past will spend a lot of time looking for their cars in mall parking lots.

- Trachman, Jay

16.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.

- Lewis Carroll

17.

The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.

- Tryon Edwards

18.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

- Proust, Marcel

19.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

- Proverb, Chinese

20.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

- Markham, Edwin