Memory Quotes

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.

Saint Mary Euphrasia (Rose Virginie Pelletier)

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Michel de Montaigne

Memory is not so brilliant as hope, but it is more beautiful, and a thousand times as true.

George Dennison Prentice

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - Never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

C. S. Lewis

There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.

Timothy Leary

Like one Who having into truth, by telling of it, Made such a sinner of his memory, To credit his own lie.

William Shakespeare, "The Tempest", Act 1 scene 2

Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, control youth, and delights old age.

Firmianus Lactantius

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - - Rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.

Bill Beattie

Many complain of their memory, few of their judgment.

Benjamin Franklin

When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them.

Jerome K. Jerome

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, 1898

All writers - All people - Have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half - Forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

Sir V Pritchett

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of thingsbut there are times when we stop. We sit sill. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

James Carroll

Memory is a giggling sprite and will not be tamed. She takes flight the moment the present becomes the past.

Real Live Preacher, weblog, 04 - 29 - 04

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

Elbert Hubbard

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Doug Larson

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. ... The new president and his first lady.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things? but there are times when we stop. We sit sill. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

James Carroll, O Magazine, October 2002

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

Leonardo da Vinci

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

John Lancaster Spalding

April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory out of desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in a forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.

T. S. Eliot

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

Elie Wiesel

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation - Rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.

Marcel Proust

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch.

Leo Buscaglia

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

Pierce Harris

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

Ingrid Bergman

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

Aeschylus

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Henry David Thoreau

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

Theodore Harold White

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

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

J. M. Barrie, British Playwright