quotations about memory
True memory, which we must now endeavour to understand, consists of knowledge of past events, but not of all such knowledge. Some knowledge of past events, for example what we learn through reading history, is on a par with the knowledge we can acquire concerning the future: it is obtained by inference, not (so to speak) spontaneously. There is a similar distinction in our knowledge of the present: some of it is obtained through the senses, some in more indirect ways. I know that there are at this moment a number of people in the streets of New York, but I do not know this in the immediate way in which I know of the people whom I see by looking out of my window. It is not easy to state precisely wherein the difference between these two sorts of knowledge consists, but it is easy to feel the difference. For the moment, I shall not stop to analyse it, but shall content myself with saying that, in this respect, memory resembles the knowledge derived from the senses. It is immediate, not inferred, not abstract; it differs from perception mainly by being referred to the past.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Memory", The Analysis of Mind
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.
ALAN COOPER
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Has it ever happened to you...? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you're going to remember that moment for the rest of your life.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Memories are like flagstones, time and distance work upon them like drops of acid.
UGO BETTI
Crime on Goat Island
Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They're all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?
DAN SIMMONS
Olympos
It was not that he didn't remember he once had another sort of life. But, like the old yellowing photograph at home, which he did not burn, it was sad to think about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared forever.
GAO XINGJIAN
One Man's Bible
Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall
Shadows of the thoughts of day,
And thy fortunes, as they fall,
The bias of the will betray.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Memory
Memory is a bad book-keeper.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Memory is the greatest traveler.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Remembering. I am half-smiling at ridiculous situations, crazy people and strange places, all with the benefit of hindsight. I admit I am choosing my memories selectively. I am quickening time, losing years and even improving my looks. I have never included the bad side which, I know, is an integral part of one's memories. That was not for me.
JOHN KEMP
Sticky Wicket
Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
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.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
So in the heart,
When, fading slowly down the past,
Fond memories depart,
And each that leaves it seems the last;
Long after all the rest are flown,
Returns a solitary tone,
The after-echo of departed years,
And touches all the soul to tears.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The After-Echo"
Memory demands (a) an image, (b) a belief in past existence. The belief may be expressed in the words "this existed."
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Memory", The Analysis of Mind