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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"I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection."
"The memory of past troubles is pleasant. [Lat., Jucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum.]"
"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?"
"Of all the rewards of virtue, . . . the most splendid is fame, for it is fame alone that can offer us the memory of posterity."
"I hope that the memory of our friendship will be everlasting."
"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities."
"People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive."
"Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory."
"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper."
"My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it."
"Now and then may not be enough…You have to enjoy it while you’re still young. enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can’t do it anymore."
"Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means."
"Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy."
"Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow."
"The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory."
"In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart."
"My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught."
"Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."
"It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. But it is also true that without memory we could not have self in any season. The more memories you have, the more you have. That is why, as Swift said, No wise man ever wished to be younger."
