Memories - Quotes

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

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape. - John Lancaster Spalding

Every man’s memory is his private literature. - Aldous Huxley

Few have wished for memory as much as they have longed for forgetfulness. - Arthur Helps

Good memories are our second chance at happiness. - Queen Elizabeth II

Good things have to be engraved on the memory; bad ones stick there of themselves. - Charles Reade

Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. - Diane Ackerman

Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories? - Dan Simmons

I have memories – but only a fool stores his past in the future. - David Gerrold

I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. - Stefan Zweig

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings. - Ivan Klima

If you remember the day’s blessings and forget the day’s troubles, then you have a good memory. - Unknown

In the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures. - Gao XingJian

Keep all special thoughts and memories for lifetimes to come. Share these keepsakes with others to inspire hope and build from the past, which can bridge to the future. - Mattie Stepanek

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin. - Brian Ruckley

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Memories are always special. Sometimes, we laugh by recalling the days we cried and sometimes, we cry while recalling the days we laughed. - Unknown

Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own. - Stephen King

Memories are nothing but the lash with which yesterday flogs tomorrow. - Philip Moeller

Memories are the treasures that we keep locked deep within the storehouse of our souls, to keep our hearts warm when we are lonely. - Becky Aligada

Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart. - Haruki Murakami

Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others. - Rosa Parks

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. - Philip Roth

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going. - William Shatner

Memory breeds in me strange loneliness. - William Herbert Carruth

Memory builds a pathway that goes winding through the heart and keeps friends close together even though they are far apart. - Unknown

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 fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. - Joan Didion

Memory feeds imagination. - Amy Tan

Memory is a bad book-keeper. - Edward Counsel

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. - Pierce Harris

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. - Unknown 

Memory is an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself. - Unknown

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

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since. - Josephine Hart

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can rote volumes. - Martin Farquhar Tupper

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do. - Stefan Zweig

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of the past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life. - Unknown

Memory is the greatest traveller. - Edward Counsel

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul. - Richard Schickel

Memory is the scribe of the soul. - Aristotle

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. - Cicero

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe. - George Santayana

Memory may be but a power of coming to the treasury of Fact, a momentary self-desertion, an absence in spirit from the now, an actual coursing hither and thither, by the mind, slipped from its leash, a life, as in the mystery of dreams, spent within the limits of a moment. - Martin Farquhar Tupper

Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are. - Plutarch

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile. - George Eliot

My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. - E. L Doctorow

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

No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car. - August Strindberg

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories. - Haruki Murakami

No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations. - Louis L'Amour

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

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. - Franklin Pierce Adams

Number can be deleted from the phone but memories cannot be deleted from the brain. - Unknown

One day, you’ll be just a memory for some people. Do your best to be a good one. - Unknown

Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. - Alexander McCall Smith

Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. - Cyril Connnolly

Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime. We’ll take the best, forget the rest, and someday will find that these are the best of times. - Styx

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not. - Tobias Wolff

So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story. - Sarah Dessen

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

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

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly. - Daniel J. Levitin

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter. - Charles de Lint

The real moment has disappeared but you will always have the memories to remind you. - Sydney

The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. - Alexander Lowen

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

The true art of memory is the art of attention. - Samuel Johnson

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared. - Lois Lowry

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly. - Dan Simmons

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

Time's the thief of memory. - Stephen King

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly. - Edgar Allan Poe

To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation. - Anthony Quayle

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs. - George Eliot

We each need to make peace with our own memories. We have all done things that make us flinch. - Surya Das

What is human memory?... It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events. - Arthur C. Clarke

When all is lost, there is still a memory. - Dejan Stojanovic

When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure. - Unknown

You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories. - Stanislaw Lec

You can't run away from memories, no matter how hard you try. - John Saul

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. - John Green

You will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory. Make the most of the moment because you never know what you have until it’s gone. - Kavana Lewis

Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! - John Irving