Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and -- I can't remember what the third thing is.
Memory is the scribe of the soul.
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.
People tend to remember my performances, not me.
Never forget what you need to remember.
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.
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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.
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.
There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys.
I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.
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.
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?
The more connections that can be made in the brain, the more integrated the experience is within memory.
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.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Memory is the thing you forget with.
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.
Sweet is the memory of past troubles.
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start when memory plays an old tune on the heart!
I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
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.
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.
Lord, keep my memory green.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.
Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age.
Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
Creditors have better memories than debtors.
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.
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.
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.
We have all forgot more than we remember.
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.
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
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.
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.
Remember, your prerogative is to govern, and not to serve the things of this world.
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.
It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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.
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.
I'm still chasing girls. I don't remember what for, but I'm still chasing them.
Memories are all we really own.
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.
What we learn with pleasure we never forget.
The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.
He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.
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.
The selective memory isn't selective enough.
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
We don't remember days; we remember moments.
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.
Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.
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!
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
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.
That translucent alabaster of our memories.
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.
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.
When you are right no one remembers; when you are wrong no one forgets.
The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.
The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.
You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.
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.
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.
Time -- our youth -- it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.
Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.
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.
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.
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
Observation is an old man's memory.
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
Don't remember what you can infer.
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Of what significance are the things you can forget.
Those who cannot remember the past will spend a lot of time looking for their cars in mall parking lots.
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
If you are speaking the truth you don't have to remember anything.
So live that your memories will be part of your happiness.
Memory: We retain: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we see •50 percent of what we hear and see; 70 percent of what we say; 90 percent of what we say and do
Nothing improves the memory more than trying to forget.
People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.
Be careful about lending a friend money. It may damage her memory.
Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.
— Virgil
That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.