Memory Quotes
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I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.
Rene Descartes
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Grief is only the memory of widowed affection. The more intense the delight in the presence of the object, the more poignant must be the impression of the absence.
James Martineau
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Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Botswain, a dog.
Lord Byron
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The wave of memory had submerged me for a whole minute, while I'd just sat staring and let it all come flooding back.
Elizabeth Wein
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Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one.
Elizabeth Loftus
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The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
George Eliot
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Did you ever notice how friendships are a lot like pop songs? They are for girls, anyway. First there's the newness of it, the melody that streams into your head and makes you wonder ― will I like this song? Then come the vocals, what the song's heart truly sounds like, and with it the song's purpose, it's lyrics ― will they say something meaningful about my life? Will these words help me through a difficult time, or create a memory that will make me smile whenever I hear this song again?
Brando Skyhorse
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I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.
Edith Konecky
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
Erica Jong
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I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.
Elena Ferrante
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But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.
Leslie Marmon Silko
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Perhaps, if we don't always have a conscious conscience, we have a subliminal one, from which the memory of past wrongs is not so easily erased.
Eva Hoffman
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Some studies make such a deep impression on you that they stay etched in your memory forever.
Jan Timman
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Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.
Aristotle
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When I was born I was given a choice. To be astoundingly cute or to have a great memory.
Sanha
Astro
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Time takes life away and gives us memory, gold with flame, black with embers.
Adam Zagajewski
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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
Honore de Balzac
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To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms.
Claude Simon
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They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first – they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all – The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.
Lord Byron
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Each time a Palestinian or an Israeli dies, it is terrible. But they have the right to have a funeral, to be buried, to have a place in the memory of the survivors. And then you have these other places - Darfur, Rwanda, even Colombia - where the dead have no faces and literally cannot be counted. Theirs are minuscule lives moving toward imperceptible deaths. For me, it is the essence of tragedy.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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Perhaps the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime.
Elizabeth Bisland
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The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugene Ionesco