Memory Quotes
Most popular memory quotes
An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.
As a result of these symbolic temporal relations, most people tend to live more in the verbally remembered past and the verbally imagined future than in the present moment.
A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar.
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.
Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
To make memories, to keep alive the memory of triumphs and failures, of moments of happiness and of suffering, is the only way to avoid being "children" in the worst sense of the word: immature, inexperienced, tremendously vulnerable.
The manipulation of memory is never innocent; rather, it is dishonest.
Count reminiscences like money.
It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
We do not remember days; we remember moments.
The moment may be temporary, but the memory is forever.
Recall it as often as you wish, a happy memory never wears out.
Each of us is the accumulation of our memories.
One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?
To live without a memory is to live alone.
There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
You never know when you're making a memory.
Our memories are card indexes—consulted, and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.
What is memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.
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.
I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
There are times when forgetting can be just as important as remembering— and even more difficult.
Remembering is a dream that comes in waves.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories.
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
We have all got our "good old days" tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in dreams like cats to favorite armchairs.
The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers.
A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.
The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead; the living have no right to forget.
Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
Memory is a net: one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
It is not so easy to forget.
Tis sweet to think on what was hard t'endure.
Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolor.
Love and memory last, and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness.
O Memory! Thou fond deceiver.
Memory is so much better at unhappiness than happiness.
My greatest inspiration ... is memory.
I have no guarantee of what is written here but memory, a known cheat.
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life, even to its first exquisite beginnings.
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.
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.
In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.
It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.
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.
Our memories are card-indexes, consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling the bloom.
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.
Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.
It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.
Memory is a skilled seducer.
When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror writing or otherwise disguised.
The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling it speaks the truth.
Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
No memory is ever alone, it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
Memory is more indelible than ink.
Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his, or her, life a work of art and an unfaithful record.
Without our knowing it, we see reality through glasses colored by the subconscious memory of previous experiences.
Memory is history recorded in our brain.
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
For a purely untrustworthy human organ, the memory is right in there with the penis.
What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen.
The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert.
Memory is a nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate.
We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present.
Some men's memory is like a box, where a man should mingle his jewels with his old shoes.
Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.
To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
Memory, the warder of the brain.
My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.
Memory performs the impossible for man; holds together past and present, gives continuity and dignity to human life. This is the companion, this is the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel.
Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.
Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face.
Memory ... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.
The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
