Memory Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

Michel de Montaigne

Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

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

Theodor W. Adorno

The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty — who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause — can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Henry David Thoreau

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

Arthur Conan Doyle

We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures

Our memory is like one of those shops in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

When the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still, and on the silence of the town
The insubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.

Alexander Pushkin

Oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Abraham Lincoln

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory…In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

Any one who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory. Good culture is born of a good disposition; and since the cause is more to be praised than the effect, I will rather praise a good disposition without culture, than good culture without the disposition.

Leonardo da Vinci

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals—minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hen's backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food. He is not called upon to support his offspring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green.

William Shakespeare

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Abraham Lincoln

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but his memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!

Arthur Conan Doyle

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy—that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

'Tis in my memory lock'd,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

William Shakespeare

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory... we are all kings in exile.

G. K. Chesterton

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.