Quotes about memory

"Creditors have better memories than debtors."

Franklin, Benjamin on memory
3 fans of this quote   

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

Fulghum, Robert on memory   

"Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing."

Fuller, Thomas on memory   

"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 on memory   

"We have all forgot more than we remember."

Fuller, Thomas on memory   

"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 on memory   

"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."

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

Hazlitt, William on memory   

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

Herbert, George on memory   

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on memory   

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

Hubbard, Elbert on memory
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"Every man's memory is his private literature."

Huxley, Aldous on memory
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"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 on memory
3 fans of this quote   

"The true art of memory is the art of attention."

Johnson, Samuel on memory   

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

Johnson, Samuel on memory
3 fans of this quote   

"Remember, your prerogative is to govern, and not to serve the things of this world."

Kempis, Thomas on memory   

"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, Søren on memory   

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

Kingsolver, Barbara on memory   

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Kundera, Milan on 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 on 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 on memory   

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

Lewis, Joe E. on memory   

"Memories are all we really own."

Lieberman, Elias on memory   

"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 on memory   

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

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia on memory
8 fans of this quote   

"What we learn with pleasure we never forget."

Mercier, Alfred on memory   

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De on memory   

"He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying."

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De on memory   

"What a wonderful faculty is memory! -- the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds -- this faithful witness against us for good or evil."

Moodie, Susanna on memory   

"The selective memory isn't selective enough."

Morrison, Blake on memory   

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich on memory
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"Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven."

Paul, Jean on memory   

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

Pavese, Cesare on memory
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"We don't remember days; we remember moments."

Pavese, Cesare on memory   

"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 on memory   

"Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance."

Poe, Edgar Allan on memory
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"Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought."

Pope, Alexander on memory
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"Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!"

Pope, Alexander on memory   

"One lives in the hope of becoming a memory."

Porchia, Antonio on memory   

"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 on memory