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.
Badness of memory every one complains of, but nobody of the want of judgment.
Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.
A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
The powerful hold in deep remembrance an ill-timed pleasantry.
Perhaps the remembrance of these things will prove a source of future pleasure.
I shall remember while the light lives yet
And in the night time I shall not forget.
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
Wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse.
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet.