Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Michel de Montaigne

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

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

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

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

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Allen, Fred A.

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

Herbert, George

10.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

Connolly, Cyril

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Trachman, Jay

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.

Rachel Carson

16.

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

Fermi, Enrico

17.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

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.

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

Pope, Alexander

20.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

21.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

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

Fulghum, Robert

23.

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

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.

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.

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

Dante Alighieri

27.

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

28.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

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

33.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

34.

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

Didion, Joan

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

38.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

39.

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

Coward, Noel

40.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

41.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

42.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

43.

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

44.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

45.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

47.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

48.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

49.

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

Benjamin, Walter

50.

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