Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Lewis Carroll

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

Mark Twain

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

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

10.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

Basile

13.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

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.

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

16.

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

Kempis, Thomas

17.

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

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

21.

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

22.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

23.

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

Allen, Fred A.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Paul, Jean

27.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

28.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

29.

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

30.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

31.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

32.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

34.

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

Benjamin, Walter

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

41.

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

42.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

43.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

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.

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

47.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

48.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

49.

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

Bumper Sticker

50.

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