Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

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

Fermi, Enrico

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

Lewis, Joe E.

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

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

Trachman, Jay

12.

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

13.

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

Allen, Fred A.

14.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Bunuel, Luis

18.

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

19.

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

20.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

Rivarol, Antoine

21.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

22.

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

Didion, Joan

23.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

24.

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

Aristotle

25.

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

Connolly, Cyril

26.

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Pavese, Cesare

27.

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

Lewis Carroll

28.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

You can fall ill with just a memory.

Paolo Giordano

30.

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

31.

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

Herbert, George

32.

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

Proverb, Persian

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Coward, Noel

40.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

41.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

42.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

43.

Memory is like a purse, if it be over-full that it cannot shut, all will drop out of it. Take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof.

Fuller, Thomas

44.

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

Alexander Smith

45.

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

Bumper Sticker

46.

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

47.

Never forget what you need to remember.

Bartley, Garrett

48.

Memories are all we really own.

Lieberman, Elias

49.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

50.

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