Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- Lewis Carroll

Best Quotes about Memory

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

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

Fermi, Enrico

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Michel de Montaigne

13.

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

14.

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

Paul, Jean

15.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

Benjamin, Walter

16.

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

17.

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

Allen, Fred A.

18.

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

Hazlitt, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

22.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

23.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

24.

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

Fulghum, Robert

25.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

26.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

27.

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

28.

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

Herbert, George

29.

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

Pavese, Cesare

30.

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

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

33.

For the memory of love is sweet, though the love itself were in vain. And what I have lost of pleasure, assuage what I find of pain.

Lyster

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Rogers, Will

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Didion, Joan

49.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

50.

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

Connolly, Cyril