Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

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 diary that we all carry about with us.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Didion, Joan

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

Rogers, Will

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

10.

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

Bumper Sticker

11.

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

12.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

13.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

14.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

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

Basile

16.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

17.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

21.

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

22.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

23.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

24.

The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.

Proverb, Persian

25.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

26.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

27.

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

Mark Twain

28.

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

29.

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

Trachman, Jay

30.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

33.

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

Pavese, Cesare

34.

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

Fermi, Enrico

35.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, Irish

41.

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

42.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

43.

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

Williams, Tennessee

44.

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

45.

Every man's memory is his private literature.