Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Kempis, Thomas

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

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

Paul, Jean

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

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

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

Twain, Mark

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

10.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

11.

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

Rogers, Will

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

17.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Bunuel, Luis

20.

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

Fermi, Enrico

21.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

22.

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

Proverb

23.

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

Lewis Carroll

24.

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

25.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

26.

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

Alexander Smith

27.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

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

Mark Twain

33.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

37.

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

Fulghum, Robert

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

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

40.

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

41.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor wars quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory.

William Shakespeare

42.

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

Proverb, Irish

43.

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

44.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

45.

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

46.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

47.

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

48.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

49.

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

Dante Alighieri

50.

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