Memory Quotes

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

God gives us memory so that we may have roses in December.

J. M. Barrie

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Martin Tuppe

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

William James

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Antonio Porchia

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

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Edward de Bono

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

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.

Rita Mae Brown

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

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

Antoine De Saint - Exupery

A memory is a photograph taken by the heart to make a special moment last forever.

Unknown

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

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Michel de Montaigne

We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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

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.

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

Aeschylus

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me - Nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - But I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

John Keats, Letter to Fanny Brawne, Feb 1820 - Died 1 year late

There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.

Lester J. Pourciau

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

George Dennison Prentice

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.

Cicero

Memory feeds imagination.

Amy Tan

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

J. M. Barrie, British Playwright

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

James Branch Cabell

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose - Garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

T. S. Eliot

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

Leonardo da Vinci

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A liar should have a good memory.

Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria

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

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 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 Fulle

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

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Samuel Johnson

We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory shall swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of nature.

Abraham Lincoln