Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

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

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.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

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

Memory is like a purse, if it be over-full that it cannot shut, all will drop out of it. Take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof.

Fuller, Thomas

The more connections that can be made in the brain, the more integrated the experience is within memory.

Campbell, Don

Jane Austen

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

Allen, Fred A.

10.

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

Williams, Tennessee

11.

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

Pavese, Cesare

12.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

13.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

14.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

15.

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

16.

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

Johnson, Samuel

17.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

18.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

19.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

20.

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

Bumper Sticker

21.

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

Connolly, Cyril

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Herbert, George

25.

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

26.

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

Mark Twain

27.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

28.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Pope, Alexander

32.

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

33.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

34.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

35.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

36.

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

37.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

38.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

39.

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

Rogers, Will

40.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

44.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Kempis, Thomas

48.

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

49.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

50.

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