Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

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

People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

Fulghum, Robert

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

Johnson, Samuel

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 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

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Fuller, Thomas

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

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

Bumper Sticker

10.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

11.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Rogers, Will

15.

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

16.

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

Seattle, Chief

17.

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

Lewis Carroll

18.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

19.

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

Allen, Fred A.

20.

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

21.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

26.

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

Foley, Tim

27.

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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.

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

Benjamin, Walter

30.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Williams, Tennessee

31.

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

32.

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

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

33.

Lord, keep my memory green.

Dickens, Charles

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

37.

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

Proverb, Persian

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

40.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

41.

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

42.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

43.

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

Herbert, George

44.

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

Pope, Alexander

45.

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

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Trachman, Jay

50.

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

Alexander Smith