Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.
Lewis B. SmedesThe invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
SocratesIn the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynWe only really remember things for five years. After that, what we remember, what's actually etched in our brain is our memory of the thing, not the thing itself. And five years after that, what's left is our memory of the memory.
Laura DaveMostly 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 SallisMemory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
Alain Robbe-GrilletMemory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
Kazuo IshiguroI don't remember my childhood very well at all, but my earliest memory is holding a man's hand as I was walking down the street at about 1ะะ . I can still remember the shoes I was wearing, but I don't know who the man was or what the memory relates to.
Naomie HarrisI learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.
Terry GrossOne often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.
Erich Maria RemarqueYour 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!
John IrvingSometimes I wanted to take a memory - one perfect memory - curl up in it, and go to sleep.
Kiersten WhiteFor all aspects of memory, keep yourself physically fit. My catchphrase is, Healthy mind, healthy body, healthy body, healthy mind. Your memory needs oxygen as fuel, so why not feed it often?
Tony BuzanWe have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it's a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease.
Howard Mansfield'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.
Joshua FoerRecording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.
Yvonne Adhiambo OwuorThis was a memory I wanted to keep, whole, and recall again and again. When I was fifty years old I wanted to remember this moment on the porch, holding hands with Cameron while he shared himself with me. I didnโt want it to be something on the fringes of my memory like so many other things about Cameron and myself.
Sara ZarrLiving in the present moment requires discretion toward memory. Without memory we'd have amnesia. What good would there be in that? Offer discretion and discernment for our past with a broad spectrum of forgiveness. As for our present moment, delight. And dedication to remain fully present to all the possibility.
Mary Anne RadmacherAs for my memory, I have a particularly good one. I never keep any record of my investigations or experiments. My memory files all these things away conveniently and reliably. I should say, though, that I didnโt cumber it up with a lot of useless matter.
Charles Proteus SteinmetzYou 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 MoglenThe one thing that's missing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and I don't imagine we'll see it any time soon, is that there's no memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of how the memory of 9/11 was used. Memory is a very interesting thing. We very selectively curate our story and then stop when it begins to tell other people's stories and forces us to accept some kind of culpability. One reason I write is that there's not enough Muslims writing, Pakistanis writing, not enough people of faith writing about the complexities of our experiences.
Haroon MoghulI could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.
Pat ConroyMemory 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.
Thomas FullerDon'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 SuleimanIt is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Edgar DegasMom 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 FoerThere are a hundred places where I fear To go, --so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
Edna St. Vincent MillayI think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
Haruki MurakamiCommon 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 MorganYet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it.
Fay WeldonAn animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.
Storm JamesonMemory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.
Holly BlackToday is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
Thomas CarlyleWhatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I've built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don't understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren't from here, but that are so real.
Elizabeth ScottIn the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.
Dwight YoakamAs 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 MaharajWhen I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling-and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find-I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me.
Rod SerlingI don't want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory.
Cecelia AhernA 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 BrownBooks are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Susan SontagAnd 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 WordsworthWhen we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.
Maria KonnikovaWith 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.
Thucydides