Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

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

Benjamin, Walter

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Michel de Montaigne

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

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

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

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

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

10.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

11.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

12.

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

13.

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

Allen, Fred A.

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

20.

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

Hazlitt, William

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.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Herbert, George

26.

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

Smith, Alexander

27.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

28.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

29.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

30.

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

Alexander Smith

31.

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

Lewis Carroll

32.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

33.

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

Kempis, Thomas

34.

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

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

36.

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

Proverb

37.

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

38.

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

Trachman, Jay

39.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

40.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

41.

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

Mark Twain

42.

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

43.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys.

Bumper Sticker

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.