Motivational Quotes

Memory

People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.

- Gellhorn, Martha

Best Quotes about Memory

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

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

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

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

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

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

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

Bunuel, Luis

One lives in the world's memory only by what they have done in the world's behalf.

Proverb

10.

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

11.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

14.

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

Ionesco, Eugene

15.

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

16.

I'm still chasing girls. I don't remember what for, but I'm still chasing them.

Lewis, Joe E.

17.

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

Bumper Sticker

18.

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

Michel de Montaigne

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

23.

Gellhorn, Martha

24.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

25.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

26.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

27.

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

Mark Twain

31.

Paradoxically one of the greatest advantages of mind maps is that they are seldom needed again. The very act of constructing a map is itself so effective in fixing ideas in memory that very often a whole map can recalled without going back to it at all. A mind map is so strongly visual and uses so many of the natural functions of memory that frequently it can be simply read off in the mind's eye.

Russell, Peter

32.

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

Dante Alighieri

33.

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

34.

When you are right no one remembers; when you are wrong no one forgets.

Proverb, Irish

35.

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

Trachman, Jay

36.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

37.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

38.

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

Fermi, Enrico

39.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

41.

Memory is the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and, the council chamber of thought.

Basile

42.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

43.

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

Lewis Carroll

44.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

45.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

47.

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

48.

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

Pope, Alexander

49.

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

Smith, Alexander

50.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous