Motivational Quotes

Memory

To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Kempis, Thomas

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

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

Dante Alighieri

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

Didion, Joan

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

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

10.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

11.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

12.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

13.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

14.

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

Coward, Noel

15.

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

Williams, Tennessee

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

18.

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

19.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

21.

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

Smith, Alexander

22.

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

Connolly, Cyril

23.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

24.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

Levi, Primo

25.

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

26.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

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

28.

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

Bunuel, Luis

29.

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

Basile

30.

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

Pavese, Cesare

31.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

32.

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

33.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

34.

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

35.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

36.

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and -- I can't remember what the third thing is.

Allen, Fred A.

37.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

38.

The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.

Proverb, Persian

39.

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

Mark Twain

40.

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

41.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

42.

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.

43.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

Rogers, Will

45.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

46.

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

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

49.

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

50.

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