Motivational Quotes

Memory

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

- Morrison, Blake

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

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

Pope, Alexander

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

William Shakespeare

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

Coward, Noel

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

10.

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

11.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

12.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

13.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Twain, Mark

19.

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

Kempis, Thomas

20.

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

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.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

23.

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

Allen, Fred A.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

31.

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

32.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

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

35.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

36.

The more connections that can be made in the brain, the more integrated the experience is within memory.

Campbell, Don

37.

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

38.

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

Fulghum, Robert

39.

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

Herbert, George

40.

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

Smith, Alexander

41.

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

Alexander Smith

42.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

43.

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

Bunuel, Luis

44.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

45.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

46.

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

47.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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