Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Dante Alighieri

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

Proverb

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Fulghum, Robert

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

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Didion, Joan

10.

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

Alexander Smith

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.

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

Pavese, Cesare

13.

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

Campbell, Don

14.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

15.

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

Michel de Montaigne

16.

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

Smith, Alexander

17.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

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

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 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

22.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

24.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

25.

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

Benjamin, Walter

26.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

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

30.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

31.

Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age.

Firmianus, Lactantius

32.

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

Connolly, Cyril

33.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Twain, Mark

43.

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

Rogers, Will

44.

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

45.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

46.

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

Kempis, Thomas

47.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

48.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

49.

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

50.

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