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:

Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in - it's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.

Woody Allen Midnight In Paris (2011)

Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, my thoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years; and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous.

William Shakespeare

I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory.

Florence Nightingale

Perform Vishnu smaranam in Shiva temples and Shiva smaranam in Vishnu temples. Without fail, all those who have gathered here today remember these. The world is full of troubles.

Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji

It's the simple things that are really effective. Try to remember that.

Theodore Sturgeon Two Percent Inspiration (1941)