Famous Quotes & Sayings

William James

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

William James

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.

William James

Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

William James

An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.

William James

The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary to this.

William James

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

William James

You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

William Finnegan

Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.

William Gibson

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

Sara Zarr

This was a memory I wanted to keep, whole, and recall again and again. When I was fifty years old I wanted to remember this moment on the porch, holding hands with Cameron while he shared himself with me. I didn’t want it to be something on the fringes of my memory like so many other things about Cameron and myself.

Sara Zarr

I don’t want these memories to become slippery, to just disappear into the thin air of life the way most things seem to. I want them to stick – even the bad ones – so I repeat them often.

Sara Zarr

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

Sara Zarr

Because love, love is never finished. It circles and circles, the memories out of order and not always complete.

Sara Zarr

Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.

Sarah Addison Allen

Memories, even hard memories, grew soft like peaches as they grow older.

Sarah Addison Allen

Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

Samuel P. Huntington

Turkey has its own interests and historically, Turkey conquered most of the Arab world, and the Arabs had to fight wars of liberation to free themselves from the Turks. That's in the past and that doesn't necessarily shape what is going on but it's there and it's there in people's memories.

William Ellery Channing

The sin that now rises to memory as your bosom sin, let this first of all be withstood and mastered. Oppose it instantly by a detestation of it, by a firm will to conquer it, by reflection, by reason, and by prayer.

William Faulkner

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

William Faulkner

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

William Faulkner

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Whittaker Chambers

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory

Saint Francis de Sales

A heart-memory is better than a mere head-memory. Better to carry away a little of the love of Christ in our souls, than if we were able to repeat every word of every sermon we ever heard.

Saint Augustine

By and by never comes.

Ugo Betti

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

Umberto Eco

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

Umberto Eco

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

Umberto Eco

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing."

Richard Dawkins

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

Roger Ascham

A man, groundly learned already, may take much profit himself in using by epitome to draw other men’s works, for his own memory sake, into short room.

Robin Wasserman

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.

Robin Ince

Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely 'skull water' with the memory of brains.

Robin Hobb

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?