Motivational Quotes

Memory

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

- Thoreau, Henry David

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

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

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

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

Hazlitt, William

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Williams, Tennessee

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin, Walter

14.

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

Barkin, Ellen

15.

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

Fermi, Enrico

16.

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

Didion, Joan

17.

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

Rogers, Will

18.

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

Trachman, Jay

19.

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

20.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Aeschylus

21.

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

Rogers, Will

22.

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

23.

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

Lewis Carroll

24.

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

Connolly, Cyril

25.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

26.

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

Coward, Noel

27.

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

Paul, Jean

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Pavese, Cesare

31.

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

32.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

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

Proverb

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Michel de Montaigne

36.

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

37.

The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.

Tryon Edwards

38.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Porchia, Antonio

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Smith, Alexander

42.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Allen, Fred A.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

48.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

49.

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

50.

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

Dante Alighieri