Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Michel de Montaigne

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

Paul, Jean

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

Herbert, George

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

The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.

Tryon Edwards

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

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

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

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.

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

Twain, Mark

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Lewis Carroll

14.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

15.

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

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

Pavese, Cesare

17.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

18.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

19.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

20.

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

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 palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

25.

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

Mark Twain

26.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

Campbell, Don

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

32.

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

33.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

34.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

36.

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

Trachman, Jay

37.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

38.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

39.

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

Dante Alighieri

40.

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

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.

Be careful about lending a friend money. It may damage her memory.

44.

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

45.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

46.

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

47.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

48.

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

Allen, Fred A.

49.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

50.

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