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

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

Aeschylus

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

Doug Larson

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

Martin Tuppe

I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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

Elie Wiesel

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

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

Elbert Hubbard

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.

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 general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

Francis Bacon

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

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

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

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

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.

Lyste

Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

Richard Whately

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

George Dennison Prentice

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

James Branch Cabell

Memory feeds imagination.

Amy Tan

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

P. D. James

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

James M. Barrie

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

A liar should have a good memory.

Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence he is just using his memory.

Leonardo DaVinci

Each happiness of yesterday is a memory for tomorrow.

George W. Douglas

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

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

Unknown

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

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel

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

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

Everyone complains of his lack of memory, but nobody of his want of judgment.

La Rochefoucauld