Skip to content

Memory Quotes

Memory has a small number of very good, well-sourced lines. Oscar Wilde, in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), calls it the diary we all carry about with us. William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), says that forgetting is as important a function of the intellect as recollecting. Ray Bradbury, in Long After Midnight (1976), says that God gives us dreadful gifts and the most dreadful is memory.

The flagged lines are the kind that circulate on social media. “Remember me with smiles and laughter” is credited to Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” to Dr. Seuss, and a line about the sap in the trees carrying the memory of the red man to Chief Seattle. All three are marked misattributed.

Random quote on Memory

Most quoted on memory:

Mirrors reverse life, memories reverse time.

Ron English Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

Ghosts, I was thinking, memories—I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

Ben Aaronovitch Moon Over Soho (2011)

Human memory is incredible: despite attempts to eradicate the cultural identity of Africans during slavery, it has survived

Angelique Kidjo

For me, listening between worlds means accepting that memory, spirit, and presence do not always appear in fixed or defined forms

Manyaku Mashilo

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Stephen King Misery (1987)

One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.

John Cheever The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

Antonio Porchia Voces (1943)

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced.

Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

Hart Crane

Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.

Roger Kahn

The past is a painful memory to me. The past was an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh.

Sakutarō Hagiwara Cat Town (2014)

We got off to a winning start and that is a wonderful memory to have. We had a great side in that tournament and should have advanced to the second round.

Desire Oparanozie

It’s a special place for me,Those are the memories that will last forever. I will carry it with me forever.

Manie Libbok

Oh! that the memories which survive us here
Were half so lovely as these wings of thine!
Pure relics of a blameless life, that shine
Now thou art gone.

Charles Tennyson Turner

Ordinarily men exercise their memory much more than their judgment.

Napoleon Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Emil Cioran A Short History of Decay (1949)

That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walk down a street.

Rudyard Kipling Mrs. Bathurst (1904)

What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a Tin Pan Alley hit played on a hurdy-gurdy and a memory?

Karl Kraus Sprüche und Widersprüche [Dicta and Contradictions (1909)

How can I give you up? You’re the mountains and the lake, the memories—you have them all. When you’re with me, I’m at home, wherever I am.

Lois McMaster Bujold The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

Albert Finney Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)

Related topics