Quotations: Memory

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
Aeschylus

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
Aeschylus

Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.
Guillaume Apollinaire

I do perceive that the old proverb be not alwaies trew, for I do finde that the absence of my Nath, doth breeds in me the more continuall remembrance of him.
Lady Anne Bacon

Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
Honore de Balzac

Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience and the council-chamber of thought.
Giambattista Basile

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
Henry Ward Beecher

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Bible

Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our buried hopes.
Lady Marguerite Blessington

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Elizabeth Bowen

A memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure, an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment.
Charlotte Bronte

Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.
Charlotte Bronte

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Rita Mae Brown

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

While memory watches o'er the sad review of joys that faded like the morning dew.
Thomas Campbell

How a thing grows in the human memory, in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it.
Thomas Carlyle

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
Lewis Carroll

I have the worst memory ever so no matter who comes up to me - they're just, like, 'I can't believe you don't remember me! I'm like, 'Oh Dad I'm sorry!'
Ellen DeGeneres

The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.
Tryon Edwards

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong
Ralph Waldo Emerson

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
Anatole France

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The in memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened.
Eric Hoffer

We must always have old memories and young hopes.
Arsene Houssaye

The creditor hath a better memory than the debtor.
James Howell

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

Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation.
Samuel Johnson

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.
Samuel Johnson

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Florence King

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age.
Lucis Caecilius Lactantis

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
Doug Larson

Memory is ever active, ever true. Alas, if it were only as easy to forget!
Ninon de L'Enclos

How can such deep-imprinted images sleep in us at times, till a word, a sound, awake them?
Ephraim Gotthold Lessing

I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.
Oscar Levant

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
Abraham Lincoln

Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.
John Locke

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

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
Michel de Montaigne

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time
Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.
Lester J. Pourciau

The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.
Persian Proverb

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.
Donna Roberts

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Albert Schweitzer

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Memory is a man's real possession...In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
Alexander Smith

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
Tom Stoppard

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Leonardo da Vinci

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.
Oscar Wilde

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