Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

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

Bunuel, Luis

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Trachman, Jay

10.

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

Kempis, Thomas

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

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

Paul, Jean

13.

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

Rogers, Will

14.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

Coward, Noel

15.

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

16.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

18.

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

19.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

20.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

21.

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

Dante Alighieri

22.

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

23.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

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.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

26.

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

27.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

28.

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.

29.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

Pope, Alexander

31.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

32.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

33.

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

Lewis Carroll

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

37.

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

Mark Twain

38.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

39.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

40.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

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

Bumper Sticker

42.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

46.

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

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.

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

49.

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

Pavese, Cesare

50.

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

Fermi, Enrico