Memory Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The gift from those I loved so tenderly added more and more impulse to my deeply seated love of the beautiful and from the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to be as a living thing, with voice and memory and memory and creative vigour.

Julia Margaret Cameron

The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, 'If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.'

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.

Anthony Bourdain

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

Maurice Maeterlinck

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

John Richard Hersey

Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left 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.

Thornton Wilder

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

James Branch Cabell

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

Augusto Roa Bastos

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Tennessee Williams

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Alexander Smith

What a strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, the other forward. The one is of today, the other is of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Franklin Pierce Adams

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them

Augusto Roa Bastos