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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

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

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

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

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

10.

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

Pavese, Cesare

11.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

12.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

14.

When you are right no one remembers; when you are wrong no one forgets.

Proverb, Irish

15.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Smith, Alexander

23.

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

Michel de Montaigne

24.

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

25.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

26.

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

27.

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

Benjamin, Walter

28.

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

Bunuel, Luis

29.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

30.

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

Connolly, Cyril

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Coward, Noel

39.

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

Rogers, Will

40.

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

Paul, Jean

41.

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

Pope, Alexander

42.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

43.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

44.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

45.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

46.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

47.

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

48.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

49.

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

Didion, Joan

50.

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