Motivational Quotes

Memory

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

- Dante Alighieri

Best Quotes about Memory

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

Herbert, George

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

Lewis Carroll

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green.

William Shakespeare

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Sontag, Susan

You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.

Rogers, Will

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment --but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Byron, Lord

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

10.

Be careful about lending a friend money. It may damage her memory.

11.

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.

Paul, Jean

12.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Jane Austen

13.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor wars quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory.

William Shakespeare

14.

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Michel de Montaigne

15.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

16.

The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.

Bowen, Elizabeth

17.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

19.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Friedrich Nietzsche

20.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

21.

If you are speaking the truth you don't have to remember anything.

Twain, Mark

22.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

23.

It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Kingsolver, Barbara

24.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

Coward, Noel

25.

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

26.

Time -- our youth -- it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

27.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

Fermi, Enrico

29.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Proust, Marcel

31.

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

32.

This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.

Diana, Princess of Wales

33.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

35.

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

36.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Pope, Alexander

37.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

When one of these flashbacks was reported to me by a conscious patient, I was incredulous. For example, when a mother told me she was suddenly aware, as my electrode touched the cortex, of being in the kitchen listening to the voice of her little boy who was playing outside in the yard.

Penfield, Wilder

39.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste. Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow) For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, and weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,and moan the expense of many a vanished sight. Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, and heavily from woe to woe tell over the sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.

Shakespeare, William

40.

Memories can be sad, but sometimes they can also save you.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

41.

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

Fulghum, Robert

42.

That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

Wiesel, Elie

43.

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

Santayana, George

44.

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

Colton, Charles Caleb

45.

Why is our memory good enough to recall to the last detail things that have happened to us, yet not good enough to recall how often we have told them to the same person.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

46.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

Arthur Schopenhauer

48.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.

Rachel Carson

49.

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

Trachman, Jay

50.

But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.

Arnold, Matthew