Memories quotes
6.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside memories — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down."
"No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity."
"Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out."
"All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications."
"Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching."
"We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation."
"I like Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. The black-and-white films. With music, I tend more toward the '70s stuff because I was at the shows for those, so they bring back memories."
"Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell."
"It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes."
"A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation."
"Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings."
"No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy."
"Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both."
"Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy."
"We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals."
"Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed."
"One of the side effects of losing intimacy with God is that at some point we stop doing ministry out of imagination and we begin doing it out of memory."
"I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys."
"A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor."
"Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith."
