Popular quotes about Memory! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
We no longer see the evolution of the nervous system, but that of a certain individual. The role of the memory is very important but... not as important as we believe. Most of the important things that we do don't depend on memory. To hear, to see, to touch, to feel happiness and pain; these are functions which are independent of memory; it is an a priori thing. Thus, for me, what memory does is to modify that a priori thing, and this it does in a very profound way.
Rodolfo LlinasWhen 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 WarwickI have been especially fortunate for about 50 years in having two memory banks available-whenever I can't remember something I ask my wife, and thus I am able to draw on this auxiliary memory bank. Moreover, there is a second way In which I get ideas ... I listen carefully to what my wife says, and in this way I often get a good idea. I recommend to ... young people ... that you make a permanent acquisition of an auxiliary memory bank that you can become familiar with and draw upon throughout your lives.
Linus PaulingOf one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
Ellen GlasgowMemory 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-GrilletIt 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 NabokovAll this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.
Raymond CarverWe live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
Julian BarnesWe have populations now in the West with a very short memory span. One reason for this short memory span is that television over the last fifteen years has seen a big decline in the coverage of the rest of the world.
Tariq AliWe'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 FoerTo be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.
Albert FinneyOur 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 HamplI'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.
Bruce FeilerWhat you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
Eckhart TolleMemory 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 MarchettaAnd, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.
Terry PratchettKeeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there's an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
Steven JohnsonFrom attachment comes longing, and longing breeds anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion, confused memory. From confused memory comes the ruin of discrimination; and from the ruin of discrimination, a man perishes.
Swami VivekanandaI believe in books. And when our people [coughing] - our people of Jerusalem, let's say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that's all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book - the little book - and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.
Elie WieselThe brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan KunderaA friend's loyalty lasts longer than their memory. Over the course of a long friendship, you might fight with your friend, even get angry with them. But a true friend will forget that anger after a while, because their loyalty to their friend outweighs the memory of the disagreement.
Matthew ReillyOne 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 PenkovThere 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 MillayMemory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a manโs memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
Mark LawrenceMemory 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 BlackMemory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
Frank HerbertSlenderman can invoke memory loss in all but the most resolute - you could have already had a Slenderman encounter and not remember it.
Jack GoldsteinGod is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it
Jim CymbalaThere have been studies done on people who meditate and they have found that they actually have increased grey matter in certain parts of their brain and more neural conductivity, meaning more connections between certain parts of the brain. They have increased capacity for, in some cases, memory, or reasoning.
Jennifer AshtonAfrica has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable
Lance MorrowSome people have this really clear memory of making that decision, and I don't. My earliest memories of being involved with drama or acting were in elementary school. My sister and I got dropped off at an after-school improvisation class, a time-killer for kids while parents were doing the groceries. I'm 6 years old, and I remember running amok and playing these games.
Jai CourtneyMemory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.
Paul AusterIf youโre so forgetful that youโre incapable of remembering that a co-worker isnโt pregnant on three separate occasions in as many months, I worry about your memory and cognition skills.
Mallory OrtbergI 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 AhernIt is so often the odd, the unexpected, the apparently trifling, that stamps itself upon the memory for ever, while much more memorable things pass away like a breath of wind.
Esther MeynellWhat frightens you? What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a wild thing caged? Is it the dark? A fleeting memory of a bedtime story, ghosts and goblins and witches hiding in the shadows? Is it the way the wind picks up just before a storm, the hint of wet in the air that makes you want to scurry home to the safety of your fire? Or is it something deeper, something much more frightening, a monster deep inside that you've glimpsed only in pieces, the vast unknown of your own soul where secrets gather with a terrible power, the dark inside?
Libba BrayTime's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.
Gloria NaylorYou can keep your memory intact, preserve your brain's health, and minimize the risk of aging and senile dementia, things that are greatly feared as people grow older.
Deepak ChopraReciting poetry isn't acting, it's memory work. Actor's are deceivers. People who pretend to be something else for a living aren't right in the head.
Hetty KingMy earliest memory is aged three, seeing sunlight on water and feeling it was really magical.
Miranda JulyWe 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. Eliot