Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- Dante Alighieri

Best Quotes about Memory

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

Bunuel, Luis

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Williams, Tennessee

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Pavese, Cesare

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Twain, Mark

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

Proust, Marcel

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Thomas, Lewis

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Didion, Joan

10.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

11.

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

12.

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

Michel de Montaigne

13.

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

14.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

15.

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

16.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

17.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

18.

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

19.

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

20.

If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys.

Bumper Sticker

21.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many things I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

William Shakespeare

24.

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Smith, Alexander

25.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

26.

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

27.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

28.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

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

Herbert, George

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.

Yourcenar, Marguerite

32.

I would forget it fain; But, O, it presses to my memory, like damned guilty deeds to a sinners mind.

William Shakespeare

33.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

Bunuel, Luis

34.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

35.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Connolly, Cyril

36.

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

Paul, Jean

37.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

38.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

39.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

40.

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

Trachman, Jay

41.

[Memory is] a man's real possession...In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Alexander Smith

42.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

43.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

44.

Memory: We retain: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we see ?50 percent of what we hear and see; 70 percent of what we say; 90 percent of what we say and do

45.

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

46.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

Johnson, Samuel

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Remember, your prerogative is to govern, and not to serve the things of this world.

Kempis, Thomas

50.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen