Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about 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

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

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

Mark Twain

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

Bumper Sticker

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

William Shakespeare

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

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

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

10.

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

Benjamin, Walter

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

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

13.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

14.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

15.

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

Michel de Montaigne

16.

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

Alexander Smith

17.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Williams, Tennessee

18.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

19.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

20.

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

21.

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

Dante Alighieri

22.

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

Didion, Joan

23.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

26.

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

27.

Memory: We retain: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we see ?50 percent of what we hear and see; 70 percent of what we say; 90 percent of what we say and do

28.

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

Lewis Carroll

29.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

30.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

31.

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

32.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

33.

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

34.

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

35.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

36.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

41.

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

Rogers, Will

42.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

43.

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

Basile

44.

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

Fulghum, Robert

45.

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

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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

Pavese, Cesare

47.

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

48.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

50.

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