Quotes About Memory

The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.

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.

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger.

The time must come to all of us, who live long, when memory is more than prospect. An angler who has reached this stage and reviews the pleasure of life will be grateful and glad that he has been an angler, for he will look back on days radiant with happiness, peaks of enjoyment that are no less bright because they are lit in memory by the light of a setting sun.

Of 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.

Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless. We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling but not quite touching; Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose, crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful, I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter... the bond is there in my mind and memory; Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space.

There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.

All the charm of the angler's life would be lost but for these hours of thought and memory. All along the brook, all day on lake or river, while he takes his sport, he thinks. All the long evenings in camp, or cottage, or inn, he tells stories of his own life, hears stories of his friend's lives, and if alone calls up the magic of memory.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.

Memory is not like a container that gradually fills up, it is more like a tree growing hooks onto which memories are hung. Everything you remember is another set of hooks on which more new memories can be attached. So the capacity of memory keeps on growing. The more you know, the more you can know.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

What 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.

I sell ideas. Actually, if you think about it, everything is really no more than idea. The past is nothing more than a memory, which is one kind of idea. The future is still a hope, another kind of idea. The present is fleeting and becomes a memory before you can put your hands on it. All ideas. I sell ideas.

I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.

I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

The idea of self is dependent upon attraction, aversion and memory. Memory is simply a serial account of attractions and aversions that don't exist now except in imagination.

Living 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.

A 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.

Don'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.

Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.

I'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.

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.

The only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination.

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Pure suffering has a consciousness, a tongue, a heart all its own and even the memory of it is but a pale unreality when compared with the actual experience.

I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory

There 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.

In all circumstances, I always look for the light and build around it, with little memory of pain.

Time does not act on memory to soften the edges, blur the details; if anything, it sharpens them. Emotions may lose their acid outlines, but not places and people, not if you wish to retain them.

Prophet may you be! If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, when time is old and hath forgot itself, when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy, and blind oblivion swallowed cities up, and mighty states characterless are grated to dusty nothing, yet let memory, from false to false, among false maids in love, upbraid my falsehood!

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out in the city. We celebrated Palm Sunday on 14th Street. I have a memory of walking down the street with buildings smoldering, and soldiers and cops everywhere. Anyways, it [St. Stephen’s] was a church that really taught me the things I needed to learn to not go to church. But I think it is a church that does great work, I went to a wedding there three days ago.

There 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.

Smell is the sense of memory and desire.

I 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.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

My 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.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.