Memory Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

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

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

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.

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.

The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.

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

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 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.

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

Franklin Pierce Adams

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

In either case the orator should bear clearly in mind throughout his whole speech what the fiction is to which he has committed himself, since we are apt to forget our falsehoods, and there is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.

Tennessee Williams

It 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.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

John Henry Newman

There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.

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.

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

Augusto Roa Bastos