Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Didion, Joan

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

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

10.

One lives in the world's memory only by what they have done in the world's behalf.

Proverb

11.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Michel de Montaigne

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

18.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

19.

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

20.

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

Coward, Noel

21.

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

22.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

23.

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

24.

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

Fermi, Enrico

25.

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

Basile

26.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

27.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

28.

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

Trachman, Jay

29.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

Rogers, Will

37.

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

38.

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

Mark Twain

39.

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

40.

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

Smith, Alexander

41.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

42.

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

43.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

44.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

45.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

48.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

49.

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

Bunuel, Luis

50.

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