Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

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

Trachman, Jay

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

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

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

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

Pavese, Cesare

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

13.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

18.

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

Rogers, Will

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

22.

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

23.

Why is our memory good enough to recall to the last detail things that have happened to us, yet not good enough to recall how often we have told them to the same person.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

25.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

26.

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.

27.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

30.

Bowen, Elizabeth

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 only paradise from which we cannot be driven.

Paul, Jean

33.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

34.

This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.

Diana, Princess of Wales

35.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

36.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

37.

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

Alexander Smith

38.

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

Dante Alighieri

39.

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

40.

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

Herbert, George

41.

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

42.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Campbell, Don

46.

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

47.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.