Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Herbert, George

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

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

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

Boynton, Sandra

10.

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

11.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

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.

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

Trachman, Jay

14.

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

Dante Alighieri

15.

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

16.

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

Pope, Alexander

17.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

18.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

19.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

20.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

21.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

22.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

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.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

25.

Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age.

Firmianus, Lactantius

26.

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

Rogers, Will

27.

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

28.

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

Basile

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

32.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

33.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

34.

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

35.

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

Didion, Joan

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

38.

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

39.

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

40.

You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Smith, Alexander

44.

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

Hazlitt, William

45.

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

Pavese, Cesare

46.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

47.

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

Twain, Mark

48.

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

49.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

50.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.