Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.
Thomas MertonBill Clinton's favorite memory is Hillary leaning down and putting contact paper in the drawers, in the chest of drawers in Chelsea's dorm room at Stanford. Favorite memory. Favorite memory! Out everything, favorite memory. Now, I would love to hear somebody in the media ask Hillary what contact paper is.
Rush LimbaughMemory 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.
AristotleTime doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in any way. It's more subjective than real. Time doesn't exist. I believe in memory. Memory is the real inspiration. Memory creates time. Memory is pure power. Pure power and pure strength, and pure utilization of space and time (if time is something we can really ever label). But I don't believe in time itself.
ArmanIf we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.
Ivan KlรญmaIt is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
Vladimir NabokovRAM: This gives guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest memory. That's important, because the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages.
Dave BarrySuch are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan KunderaI've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
Isabel AllendeYou 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.
Fyodor DostoevskySome day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
Irvin D. YalomSometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.
Kiersten WhiteI believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
William Butler YeatsMemory is a funny thing. It tricks you into believing that you've forgotten important moments, and then when you're raking your brain for a bit of information that might make sense of something else, it taps you on the head and says, "Remember when you told me to put that memory in the green rubbish bin? Well, I didn't, I put it in the black recycling tub, and it's coming your way again.
Melina MarchettaMemory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.
Marge PiercyThe true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Truman CapoteMemory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
Virginia WoolfYou could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to-face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory - both how it works and what it remembers. In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.
Eben MoglenOne 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 PenkovIf the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
Clive JamesCommon integration is only the memory of differentiation... The different artifices by which integration is effected, are changes, not from the known to the unknown, but from forms in which memory does not serve us to those in which it does.
Augustus De Morgan[Harold Pinter] is a British playwright and is one of my favorite writers. Harold was very obsessed with when memory becomes mythology, that at some point you change your memory to fit who you believe you are.
Baron VaughnWithout memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
Elie WieselI've often tried to describe how memory works. I've suggested this to students, and told them to close their eyes and try to remember what I look like. Then I ask them if they remember what I look like. But when you open your eyes you will be surprised how different what you thought I looked like is to what I actually look like. Because the imagination is a different raw material from actual vision. Memory is very different from the thing itself.
Lore SegalThe only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination.
Leonard JacobsonCoaches and players at the start must think their way through problems where a more experienced person would react out of habit and memory. One must not gain this experience, however, without being careful of empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artist who boasts of 20 years of experience at his craft while, in fact, all he has had is one year - 20 times.
John KesselAnd in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
Tim O'BrienWhen the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
C. S. LewisStoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.
Mahatma GandhiAs long as the mind is there, your body and your world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory.
Sri Nisargadatta MaharajIt must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.
Vincent Van GoghYou and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.
Boris PasternakPeople often think of the unconscious mind as "the gut" or perhaps the Freudian "sink" of repressed sexual desires. It's neither one of those things. It's the repository of memory, and it's the seat of decision making.
Nick Morgan[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence FerlinghettiHistory could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.
Jodi PicoultThere were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.
Elizabeth StroutA sister is the cure for swollen heads and ego trips. One may a star, a Chief Executive-famous and rich and beautiful. But one's sister has the family photo album. And a long, long memory. And a tendency to wink at one on Top Occasions.
Pam BrownAnd when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
William WordsworthFor me, all of the data that is contained in your cell memory, and in your energetic field, is able to be picked up.
Caroline MyssIn the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?
Jonathan Safran FoerHome should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.
Henry Ward BeecherThis great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.
Indu SundaresanI 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 Lo