Quotes about memory

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

— Aeschylus

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

— Fred A. Allen

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

— Aristotle

But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.

— Matthew Arnold

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

— Sholem Asch

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

— Maurice Baring

People tend to remember my performances, not me.

— Ellen Barkin

Never forget what you need to remember.

— Garrett Bartley

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

— Basile

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.

— Walter Benjamin

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

— Walter Benjamin

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.

— Elizabeth Bowen

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.

— Sandra Boynton

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

— James Branch Cabell

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

— Bumper Sticker

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

— Luis Bunuel

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.

— Luis Bunuel

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?

— Lord Byron

The more connections that can be made in the brain, the more integrated the experience is within memory.

— Don Campbell

If you want to win friends, make it a point to remember them. If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance.

— Dale Carnegie

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

— Willa Cather

Memory is the thing you forget with.

— Alexander Chase

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

— Marcus T. Cicero

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Cyril Connolly

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

— Joseph Conrad

Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start when memory plays an old tune on the heart!

— Eliza Cook

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

— Noel Coward

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

— Salvador Dali

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

— Dante Alighieri

This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.

— Princess of Wales Diana

Lord, keep my memory green.

— Charles Dickens

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

— Joan Didion

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.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

— Clifton Fadiman

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

— Enrico Fermi

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

— Lactantius Firmianus

Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.

— Tim Foley

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

— Edward M. Forster

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Robert Fulghum

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.

— Thomas Fuller

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.

— Thomas Fuller

We have all forgot more than we remember.

— Thomas Fuller

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.

— Martha Gellhorn

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

— Paul Harvey

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

— William Hazlitt

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

— George Herbert

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Elbert Hubbard

Every man's memory is his private literature.

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Eugene Ionesco

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Thomas Kempis

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.

— Søren Kierkegaard

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Milan Kundera

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.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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.

— Primo Levi

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

— Joe E. Lewis

Memories are all we really own.

— Elias Lieberman

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

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

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What we learn with pleasure we never forget.

— Alfred Mercier

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

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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.

— Susanna Moodie

The selective memory isn't selective enough.

— Blake Morrison

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Jean Paul

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

— Cesare Pavese

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

— Cesare Pavese

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.

— Wilder Penfield

Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Alexander Pope

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!

— Alexander Pope

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

— Antonio Porchia

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.

— Marcel Proust

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

— Marcel Proust

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.

— Marcel Proust

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

— Proverb

The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.

— Chinese Proverb

When you are right no one remembers; when you are wrong no one forgets.

— Irish Proverb

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

— Persian Proverb

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

— Jean Paul Richter

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

— Antoine Rivarol

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

— Will Rogers

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

— Will Rogers

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.

— Peter Russell

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.

— George Santayana

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

— Helen Hoover Santmyer

Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

— Chief Seattle

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.

— Seneca

Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.

— Cray Seymore

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.

— William Shakespeare

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

— George Bernard Shaw

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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

— Alexander Smith