quotations about memory
Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analyzable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Memory", The Analysis of Mind
To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
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
The Life of Reason
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can rote volumes.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Remembering. I am half-smiling at ridiculous situations, crazy people and strange places, all with the benefit of hindsight. I admit I am choosing my memories selectively. I am quickening time, losing years and even improving my looks. I have never included the bad side which, I know, is an integral part of one's memories. That was not for me.
JOHN KEMP
Sticky Wicket
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
So in the heart,
When, fading slowly down the past,
Fond memories depart,
And each that leaves it seems the last;
Long after all the rest are flown,
Returns a solitary tone,
The after-echo of departed years,
And touches all the soul to tears.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The After-Echo"
Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall
Shadows of the thoughts of day,
And thy fortunes, as they fall,
The bias of the will betray.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Memory
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
Soul Mountain
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
Life Thoughts
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Scars are just another kind of memory.
M. L. STEDMAN
The Light Between Oceans
Nothing screws with memory like repetition.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
I was shaking all over, and it wasn't from the vampire. Memories have teeth, too.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Bloody Bones
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
The Rise of Endymion
He who remembers, sees; and he who sees, can fly.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
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
speech at conference in Lahti, Finland, 1990