Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Rogers, Will

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

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Proverb

Observation is an old man's memory.

Swift, Jonathan

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.

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

Proverb, Persian

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

10.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

11.

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

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

Pope, Alexander

13.

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

Williams, Tennessee

14.

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

15.

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

Pavese, Cesare

16.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

17.

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

Benjamin, Walter

18.

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Bunuel, Luis

22.

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

Dante Alighieri

23.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

24.

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

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

27.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

28.

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

29.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

30.

For the memory of love is sweet, though the love itself were in vain. And what I have lost of pleasure, assuage what I find of pain.

Lyster

31.

It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Kingsolver, Barbara

32.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

34.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

35.

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

36.

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

37.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

38.

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

39.

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

40.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

41.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

42.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

43.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

44.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

Coward, Noel

45.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

46.

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

Smith, Alexander

47.

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

48.

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

Herbert, George

49.

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

Paul, Jean

50.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb