Motivational Quotes

Memory

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

Best Quotes about Memory

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

Pavese, Cesare

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Benjamin Franklin

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

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

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

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

Santmyer, Helen Hoover

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

10.

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green.

William Shakespeare

11.

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

12.

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

13.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Proust, Marcel

14.

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

15.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Cicero, Marcus T.

16.

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

Pope, Alexander

17.

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

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

21.

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

Rogers, Will

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb

24.

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

Firmianus, Lactantius

25.

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

26.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

Lewis, Joe E.

31.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Benjamin, Walter

35.

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

36.

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

Morrison, Blake

37.

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

Kingsolver, Barbara

38.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

Alexander Smith

40.

Don't remember what you can infer.

Tennant, Harry

41.

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

Coward, Noel

42.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

44.

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

Basile

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Johnson, Samuel

48.

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

Connolly, Cyril

49.

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.