Memory Quotes

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Lewis Thomas

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

If you want to win friends, make it a point to remember them. If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance.

Dale Carnegie

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Alexander Pope

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Alexander Pope

Friends depart, and memory takes themTo her caverns, pure and deep.

Thomas Haynes Bayly, Teach Me to

Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.

Thomas Fuller

Memory is like a purse, if it be over-full that it cannot shut, all will drop out of it. Take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof.

Thomas Fuller

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Thomas Fuller

It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...

Virginia Woolf

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

George Herbert

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

Christopher Hitchens

Paradoxically one of the greatest advantages of mind maps is that they are seldom needed again. The very act of constructing a map is itself so effective in fixing ideas in memory that very often a whole map can recalled without going back to it at all. A mind map is so strongly visual and uses so many of the natural functions of memory that frequently it can be simply read off in the mind's eye.

Peter Russell

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

George Eliot

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us

Oscar Wilde

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

Thomas Carlyle

Silently, one by one,in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

John Green

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

Sholem Asch