Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- Proverb, Irish

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

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

Smith, Alexander

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Coward, Noel

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

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

Benjamin, Walter

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.

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

12.

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

Trachman, Jay

13.

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

14.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Didion, Joan

21.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

22.

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

23.

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

Rogers, Will

24.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

25.

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

Bunuel, Luis

26.

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.

Wynne-Tyson, Jon

27.

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

28.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

29.

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

30.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

31.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

32.

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

Alexander Smith

33.

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

Proverb

34.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

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

Michel de Montaigne

38.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

42.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

43.

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

Boynton, Sandra

44.

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

45.

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

Lewis Carroll

46.

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

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.

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

Herbert, George

49.

Memory: We retain: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we see ?50 percent of what we hear and see; 70 percent of what we say; 90 percent of what we say and do

50.

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