An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON MEMORY
Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
Aeschylus (525-456 BC, Greek dramatist)
Life brings simple pleasures to us every day. It is up to us to make them wonderful memories.
Cathy Allen
I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and -- I can't remember what the third thing is.
Fred A. Allen (1894-1957, American radio comic)
Memory is the scribe of the soul.
Aristotle (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888, British poet, critic)
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch (1880-1957, Polish-born American writer)
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
Sandra Boynton (1953-, American cartoonist)
Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.
Maurice Baring (American author)
People tend to remember my performances, not me.
Ellen Barkin (1954-, American actress)
God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.
James M. Barrie (1860-1937, British playwright)
Never forget what you need to remember.
Garrett Bartley
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter Benjamin (1982-1940, German critic, philosopher)
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
Walter Benjamin (1982-1940, German critic, philosopher)
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 (1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist)
If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys.
Bumper Sticker
I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.
Luis Bunuel (1900-1983, Spanish film director)
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
Luis Bunuel (1900-1983, Spanish film director)
It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment -- but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?
Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)
There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
James Branch Cabell (1879-1958, American writer, critic)
The more connections that can be made in the brain, the more integrated the experience is within memory.
Don Campbell
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 (1888-1955, American trainer, author, "How to Win Friends and Influence People")
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Willa Cather (1876-1947, American author)
Memory is the thing you forget with.
Alexander Chase
Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got.
Rose Chernin
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.
Marcus T. Cicero (c. 106-43 BC, Roman orator, politician)
Sweet is the memory of past troubles.
Marcus T. Cicero (c. 106-43 BC, Roman orator, politician)
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit; posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832, British sportsman writer)
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974, British critic)
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924, Polish-born British novelist)
Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start when memory plays an old tune on the heart!
Eliza Cook (1818-1889, British poet)
I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
Noel Coward (1899-1973, British writer)
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989, Spanish painter)
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321, Italian philosopher, poet)
Lord, keep my memory green.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870, British novelist)
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion (1934-, American essayist)
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881, Russian novelist)
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Cliff Fadiman (American writer)
If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.
Enrico Fermi
Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age.
Lactantius Firmianus (260-340, Roman rhetorician, born "Christian Cicero")
Forget those things that aren't worth remembering.
Tim Foley
When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.
Jane Fonda (1937-, American screen actor)
Unless we remember, we cannot understand.
Edward M. Forster (1879-1970, British novelist, essayist)
Creditors have better memories than debtors.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790, American scientist, publisher, diplomat)
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.
Robert Fulghum (1937-, American writer, minister, working cowboy)
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 (1608-1661, British clergyman, author)
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 (1608-1661, British clergyman, author)
We have all forgot more than we remember.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661, British clergyman, author)
People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.
Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998, American journalist, author)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. To me, a picture is worth a thousand memories; for when all is said and done, it is the memories that last with us forever.
Jeffrey A. Goodman
The only permanent thing that money can buy is a happy memory.
Sydney J. Harris
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
Paul Harvey (1918-, American radio broadcaster, columnist, author)
To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830, British essayist)
A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
George Herbert (1593-1632, British metaphysical poet)
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894, American author, wit, poet)
A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.
Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915, American author, publisher)
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
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 (1912-1994, Romanian-born French playwright)
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855, Danish philosopher, writer)
It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver
It is surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera (1929-, Czech author, critic)
Why is our memory good enough to recall to the last detail things that have happened to us, yet not good enough to recall how often we have told them to the same person.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680, French classical writer)
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
Primo Levi (1919-1987, Italian chemist, author)
I'm still chasing girls. I don't remember what for, but I'm still chasing them.
Joe E. Lewis (American writer)
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-, Colombian writer)
What we learn with pleasure we never forget.
Alfred Mercier
The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592, French philosopher, essayist)
What a wonderful faculty is memory! -- the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds -- this faithful witness against us for good or evil.
Susanna Moodie (1803-1885, Canadian author)
The selective memory isn't selective enough.
Blake Morrison (1950-, British poet, critic)
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.
Mary Jo Putney
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950, Italian poet, novelist, translator)
We don't remember days; we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950, Italian poet, novelist, translator)
When one of these flashbacks was reported to me by a conscious patient, I was incredulous. For example, when a mother told me she was suddenly aware, as my electrode touched the cortex, of being in the kitchen listening to the voice of her little boy who was playing outside in the yard.
Wilder Penfield
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 (1688-1744, British poet, critic, translator)
Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744, British poet, critic, translator)
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Antonio Porchia
This boy is dead now, I knew it before taking him in my arms, I can remember his face, his suffering, his voice.
Princess Diana (1961-1997, British Princess)
Our memory is like a shop 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.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)
That translucent alabaster of our memories.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922, French novelist)
The palest ink lasts longer than the most retentive memory.
Chinese Proverb (Sayings of Chinese origin)
When you are right no one remembers; when you are wrong no one forgets.
Irish Proverb (Sayings of Irish origin)
The best memory is that which forgets nothing, but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.
Persian Proverb (Sayings of Persian origin)
Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.
Antoine Rivarol (1753-1801, French journalist, epigrammatist)
The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.
Will Rogers (1879-1935, American humorist, actor)
You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.
Will Rogers (1879-1935, American humorist, actor)
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980, American writer)
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
Time -- our youth -- it never really goes, does it? It is all held in our minds.
Helen Hoover Santmyer
A very great memory often forgetteth how much time is lost by repeating things of no use.
George Savile
Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.
Chief Seattle (1786-1866, American Indian chief of the Squeamish)
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought And with old woes now wail my dear time's waste. Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow) For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, and weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe, and moan the expense of many a vanished sight. Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, and heavily from woe to woe tell over the sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I now pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe -- though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.
Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)
Memory is the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and, the council chamber of thought.
St. Basil (329-379, Bishop of Caesarea)
Observation is an old man's memory.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745, Anglo-Irish satirist)
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
Booth Tarkington (1869-1946, American writer)
Don't remember what you can infer.
Harry Tennant
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 recognition, for old memories and old connection.
Lewis Thomas (1913-1993, American physician, educator)
Of what significance are the things you can forget.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
Those who cannot remember the past will spend a lot of time looking for their cars in mall parking lots.
Jay Trachman
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
Martin Tupper (1810-1889, British author, poet, inventor)
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Be careful about lending a friend money. It may damage her memory.
Author Unknown
For the memory of love is sweet, though the love itself were in vain. And what I have lost of pleasure, assuage what I find of pain.
Author Unknown
Memory: We retain: 10 percent of what we read; 20 percent of what we hear; 30 percent of what we see •50 percent of what we hear and see; 70 percent of what we say; 90 percent of what we say and do
Author Unknown
Nothing improves the memory more than trying to forget.
Author Unknown
One lives in the world's memory only by what they have done in the world's behalf.
Author Unknown
People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.
Author Unknown
So live that your memories will be part of your happiness.
Author Unknown
Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.
Virgil (c. 70 - 19 BC, Roman poet)
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, "No wise man ever wished to be younger."
George F. Will (1941-, American political columnist)
The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
Jon Wynne-Tyson (1924-, British author)
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order ... the continuous thread of revelation.
Eudora Welty
That is my major preoccupation -- memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
Elie Wiesel (1928-, Rumanian-born American writer)
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams (1914-1983, American dramatist)
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams (1914-1983, American dramatist)
The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987, French novelist)
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