Memory - Quotes
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
The memory of a single good deed lights our path better than the flare of a thousand torches.
There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
How I wish I could walk through the doors of my mind;
Hold memory close at hand,
Help me understand the years.
How I wish I could choose between Heaven and Hell.
The general root of superstition [is] that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.
You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
the old trees guard your childhood for you
as an ever more ancient memory.
The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.
When my hair`s all but gone and my memory fades
And the crowds don`t remember my name
When my hands don`t play the strings the same way
I know you will still love me the same...
Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother`s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I`ve written, what I`ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.