Quotes about Memory

Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages — enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.

I ca'n't remember things before they happen.' 'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

The ear never forgets what the soul says.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events

Every reminiscence is colored by the way things are today, and therefore by a delusive point of view.

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps.

The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

Why do we forget what we read in the Bible? Is it just a poor memory? No, it's a failure to meditate.