Memory Quotes

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[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

I would tell you more of Him, but how shall I?
When love becomes vast love becomes wordless.
And when memory is overladen it seeks the silent deep.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

Simone de Beauvoir

There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year.

William Shakespeare

While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to heaven,
Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven,
Or drawing from the no less kindled earth
Freedom and peace to that which boasts his birth;
While Washington's a watchword, such as ne'er
Shall sink while there's an echo left to air.

But when thou shalt be in the sweet world, I pray thee bring me to men's memory.

Dante Alighieri

Should I live for centuries, the sweet period of my youth would not be reborn, nor effaced from my memory.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Theodor W. Adorno

Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

While memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.

William Shakespeare

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

William Faulkner

With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history - he is one who can accomplish things.

And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Edgar Allan Poe

I bequeath my soul to God... My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.