Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Kempis, Thomas

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Fulghum, Robert

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

Coward, Noel

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

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

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

Rogers, Will

10.

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

11.

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

Smith, Alexander

12.

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

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

22.

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

23.

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

Lewis Carroll

24.

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

Pope, Alexander

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Trachman, Jay

28.

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

29.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

30.

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

31.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

32.

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

Paul, Jean

33.

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

Connolly, Cyril

34.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

36.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

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

38.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

39.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

40.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

41.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

42.

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

Dante Alighieri

43.

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

44.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

45.

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

46.

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

47.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

48.

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

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

Campbell, Don

50.

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