Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

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

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

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

Alexander Smith

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Smith, Alexander

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.

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

12.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

13.

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

Campbell, Don

14.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

15.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

16.

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

Kempis, Thomas

17.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

18.

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

Proverb

19.

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

20.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

24.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

25.

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

Twain, Mark

26.

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

27.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

Chase, Alexander

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

31.

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

32.

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

Rogers, Will

33.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

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

35.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

36.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

37.

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

Dante Alighieri

38.

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

Proverb, Irish

39.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

40.

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

41.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

42.

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

43.

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

Hazlitt, William

44.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

45.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

46.

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

Trachman, Jay

47.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

48.

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

Allen, Fred A.

49.

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

50.

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