Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.
AristotleWhen comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall.
Kevin WarwickMemory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them
Charles Caleb ColtonThere is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.
Floyd Red Crow WestermanAttention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.
James Russell LowellMostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.
James SallisIt 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.
George WillThe force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory - there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.
Marilynne RobinsonWe're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Joshua FoerMemory is a tenuous thing. . . . flickering glimpses, blue and white, like ancient, decomposing 16mm film. Happiness escapes me there, where faces are vague and yesterday seems to come tied up in ribbons of pain. Happiness? I look for it intead in today, where memory is something I can still touch, still rely on. I find it in the smiles of new friends, the hope blossoming inside. My happiest memories have no place in the past; they are those I have yet to create.
Ellen HopkinsOur capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell usโto write the first draft and then return for the second draftโwe are doing the work of memory.
Patricia HamplIf the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John BergerDonald Trump's slogan: "Let's make America great again." And when I hear that, that seems to suggest there was a moment in the past when America really was great, you know, when women knew their places, when we could set dogs on black people in Mississippi, when young people went and sit in at lunch counters and were assaulted by others. That's about the death of memory. That's about memory being basically suppressed in a way that doesn't allow people to understand that there were things that happened in the past that we not only have to remember, we have to prevent from happening again.
Henry GirouxWe know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can't unlock it and, essentially, wipe out what's there.
J. Michael StraczynskiMy work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory.
Elizabeth LoftusOne of the things people often say about America is that it's a such a young country, relatively, and its problem - Europeans say this - is that they have no memory. I don't agree with this. In the Balkans, the problem is that we cannot forget. The problem is we have great memory.
Miroslav PenkovDon't make your wedding a pleasant memory in this life but a source of misery in the next. Make it an eternally good memory. In trying to have a halal wedding, you might sacrifice many relationships but the opposite might mean sacrificing the only relationship that will matter in the hereafter for a bunch of people who don't even really care about you. Don't make one night the cause of your regret for an eternity.
Omar SuleimanThere are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
Timothy LearyMom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!
Jonathan Safran FoerI think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think its the same thing for a country.
Philippe FalardeauA person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.
Mary AstorThe only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination.
Leonard JacobsonGaiety is forgetfulness of the self, melancholy is memory of the self: in that state the soul feels all the power of its roots, nothing distracts it from its profound homeland and the look that it casts upon the outer world is gently dismayed.
Adrienne MonnierThe most identifiable trait of Anglo-Saxons is that we always mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
Argus HamiltonI would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.
Francis BaconI would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.
Patricia A. McKillipThe effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
Jon Wynne-TysonA great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.
John Henry NewmanTrue scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
James Russell LowellWith reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report always being tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.
ThucydidesMy earliest musical memory was getting to watch my dad play drums in a local band. He's a banker by trade, but a drummer at heart. I remember seeing the guitar player do the solo from "Werewolves of London" with his teeth, and that was the moment that had me hooked.
Charlie WorshamTime, which wears down and diminishes all things, augments and increases good deeds, because a good turn liberally offered to a reasonable man grows continually through noble thought and memory.
Francois RabelaisThree thousand people died at ground zero. Their families are entitled to a little bit of respect, to respect the memory of those poor people that died there. And how about the families of all those soldiers that died in the two ensuing wars? Aren't they entitled to a little bit of respect - the kids, the wives, the parents?
Carl PaladinoCriticizing people, winding them up, making idiots of them or fooling them doesn't make people with autism laugh. What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with later in an empty room ... When we don't need to think about other people or anything else, that's when we wear our aural expressions.
Naoki HigashidaAffirmations are like screaming that you're okay in order to overcome this whisper that you're not. That's a big contrast to actually uncovering the whisper, realizing that it's a passing memory, and moving closer to all those fears and all those edgy feelings that maybe you're not okay. Well, no big deal. None of us is okay and all of us are fine. It's not just one way. We are walking, talking paradoxes.
Pema ChodronWe die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T. S. EliotLife knows us not and we do not know lifeโ-we donโt know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow
Joseph ConradTo an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
George EliotEven when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
Oliver SacksI find it interesting that people often seem to believe that authors of realistic fiction are directly translating their personal experiences into their work. The fact is that telling a story is a transformative experience. There is rarely a one-to-one translation onto the page unless you're writing memoir, and even then, memory is unreliable. I think that the best books feel emotionally true, and that truth has to be rooted in real-world experience.
Malinda LoAgain the early-morning sun was generous with it's warmth. All the sounds dear to a horseman were around me-the snort of the horses as they cleared their throats, the gentle swish of their tails, the tinkle of irons as we flung the saddles over their backs-little sounds of no importance, but they stay in the unconscious library of memory.
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas