Motivational Quotes

Memory

Memory is the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and, the council chamber of thought.

- Basile

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Dante Alighieri

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

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

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

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

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

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

Connolly, Cyril

Time -- our youth -- it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

10.

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

Herbert, George

11.

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

Pope, Alexander

12.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

13.

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

Bunuel, Luis

14.

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

Mark Twain

15.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

16.

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

17.

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

18.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

19.

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

20.

This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.

Diana, Princess of Wales

21.

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

Rogers, Will

22.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

23.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

24.

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

25.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

26.

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

27.

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

Smith, Alexander

28.

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

29.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

30.

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

31.

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

Lewis Carroll

32.

The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.

Proverb, Persian

33.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

34.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

35.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

36.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Kempis, Thomas

42.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

43.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

44.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

45.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Campbell, Don

50.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake