Motivational Quotes

Memory

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

- Forster, Edward M.

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

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

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

Lewis Carroll

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

William Shakespeare

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

10.

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

11.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

12.

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

Rogers, Will

13.

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

Allen, Fred A.

14.

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

Kempis, Thomas

15.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

16.

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

Trachman, Jay

17.

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

Alexander Smith

18.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

19.

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

20.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

21.

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

Fermi, Enrico

22.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

23.

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

24.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Williams, Tennessee

25.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

28.

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

Michel de Montaigne

29.

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

30.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

31.

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

32.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

34.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

35.

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

36.

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

Fulghum, Robert

37.

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

Didion, Joan

38.

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

Twain, Mark

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Proverb, Persian

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.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

Arthur Schopenhauer

48.

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

Basile

49.

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

Bumper Sticker

50.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett