Famous Quotes & Sayings

Stephen Spender

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Mother Teresa

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.

Mona Simpson

I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.. moments like these are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesthe best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Paula Vogel

This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time…I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.

Paula Poundstone

I'm thankful that my memory is good because my vision is going.

Paula Poundstone

I have short-term memory loss, though I'd like to think of it as Persidential eligibility.

Paula Poundstone

I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility.

Philip Gourevitch

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Peter Kropotkin

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.

Peter Kropotkin

Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?

Peter Bondra

Obviously, I have a lot of memories here... but at the same time I'm going to put all my energies into moving forward and doing my best for the Thrashers.

Pema Chodron

When we cling to thoughts and memories, we are clinging to what cannot be grasped. When we touch these phantoms and let them go, we may discover a space, a break in the chatter, a glimpse of open sky. This is our birthright—the wisdom with which we were born, the vast unfolding display of primordial richness, primordial openness, primordial wisdom itself. When one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, we can rest in that space.

Phil Donahue

The radio of my youth ... is now a quaint memory replaced by computer hard drives.

Peter S. Beagle

Avicenna California...Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.

Peter Russell

Paradoxically one of the greatest advantages of mind maps is that they are seldom needed again. The very act of constructing a map is itself so effective in fixing ideas in memory that very often a whole map can recalled without going back to it at all. A mind map is so strongly visual and uses so many of the natural functions of memory that frequently it can be simply read off in the mind's eye.

Peter Russell

Memory is not like a container that gradually fills up, it is more like a tree growing hooks onto which memories are hung. Everything you remember is another set of hooks on which more new memories can be attached. So the capacity of memory keeps on growing. The more you know, the more you can know.

Peter Norvig

Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

Peter O'Toole

I have no memories I'm prepared to share with you.

Phylicia Rashad

Everything you do, every thought you have, every word you say creates a memory that you will hold in your body. It's imprinted on you and affects you in subtle ways - ways you are not always aware of. With that in mind, be very conscious and selective.

Phyllis Bottome

A refugee is as helpless as a new born child - but not so appealing! Besides, a new born child has no memories!

Phyllis Rose

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Philip Pullman

No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much...

Rachel Field

I was never one to begrudge people their memories. From a child I would listen when they spoke of the past.

Rachel Carson

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.

Rabindranath Tagore

A dewdrop is a perfect integrity that has no filial memory of its parentage.

Queen Elizabeth II

Good memories are our second chance at happiness.

Julian Barnes

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Julian Barnes

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

Terence McKenna

Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.

Terence McKenna

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it's not necessarily some kind of 'Be Here Now' feel-good thing because it doesn't always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It's primary.