Thomas Fuller said that memories are the treasure house of the mind. In there, monuments of our past and the events in our life are kept to be cherished and preserved. It is what makes us who we are.
Here are several of the best memories quotes and sayings that will remind you of its importance in our lives and human history.
1. “Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.” — David Halberstam
2. “Gratitude is not only the memory but the homage of the heart rendered to God for his goodness.” — Nathaniel Parker Willis
3. “A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.” — John Henry Newman
4. “Your mind, while blessed with permanent memory, is cursed with lousy recall. Written goals provide clarity. By documenting your dreams, you must think about the process of achieving them.” — Gary Ryan Blair
5. “A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together. Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood.” — Charlotte Davis Kasl
6. “There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.” — James Branch Cabell
7. “Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.” — Thomas Fuller
8. “Memory in youth is active and easily impressible in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.” — Charlotte Bronte
9. “To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.” — Anthony Quayle
10. “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
11. “Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.” — Albert Einstein
12. “No memory is ever alone it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.” — Louis L’Amour
13. “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” — Malcom X
14. “Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness.” — Gene Fowler
15. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” — William Faulkner
16. “It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.” — Marcus Fabius Quintilian
17. “Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.” — Richard Schickel
18. “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” — Aldous Huxley
19. “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” — Toni Morrison
20. “Time and memory are true artists; they remold reality nearer to the heart’s desire.” — John Dewey
21. “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” — Ingrid Bergman
22. “A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.” — Cliff Fadiman
23. “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” — Vladimir Nabokov
24. “The true art of memory is the art of attention.” — Samuel Johnson
25. “How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man’s life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.” — Richard Burton
26. “No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.” — Robert Frost
27. “Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.” — Cyril Connolly
28. “Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.” — Charles R. Swindoll
29. “Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.” — Tennessee Williams
30. “Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” — Saul Bellow
31. “The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.” — Jon Wynne-Tyson
32. “A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.” — Grandma Moses
33. “A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.” — John Henry Newman
34. “A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope.” — Charles M. Schulz
35. “There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.” — Peter Davison
36. “Time, which wears down and diminishes all things, augments and increases good deeds, because a good turn liberally offered to a reasonable man grows continually through noble thought and memory.” — Francois Rabelais
37. “The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.” — Cesare Pavese
38. “A liar should have a good memory.” — Quintilian
39. “Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.” — Richard Sheridan
40. “But the memory of war weighs undiminished upon the people’s minds. That is because deeper than material wounds, moral wounds are smarting, inflicted by the so- called peace treaties.” — Hjalmar Schacht
41. “Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.” — Ned Rorem
42. “An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.” — Franklin P. Jones
43. “Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.” — P. G. Wodehouse
44. “Memory is man’s greatest friend and worst enemy.” — Gilbert Parker
45. “Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.” — Ugo Betti
46. “The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.” — Margaret Walker
47. “Memory, in widow’s weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone.” Aubrey de Vere
48. “Fond memory brings the light of other days around me.” — Thomas More
49. “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” — Franklin P. Adams
50. “There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.” — William McFee
51. “As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.” — John Lancaster Spalding
52. “Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
53. “Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
54. “Memory is not wisdom idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?” — Martin Farquhar Tupper
55. “You can’t recover memories of a missing event. That’s a fallacy.” — Betty Hill
56. “Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!” — Henry David Thoreau
57. “You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.” — Stanislaw Lec
58. “History takes time. History makes memory.” — Gertrude Stein
59. “Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.” — Derek Walcott
60. “Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract.” — Jessamyn West
61. “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.” — Albert Schweitzer
62. “The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.” — Jerry Saltz
63. “We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.” — Joyce Carol Oates
64. “The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.” — Theodor Reik
65. “All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.” — David Herbert Lawrence
66. “I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.” — Diane Sawyer
67. “Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.” — Emile M. Cioran
68. “It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.” — Barbara Kingsolver
69. “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.” — Primo Levi
70. “Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.” — Rosa Parks
71. “Memories are fallible and a timer can save a lot of hard work from going out of the window.” — Delia Smith
72. “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.” — Elie Wiesel
73. “Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.” — Khalil Gibran
74. “I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.” — Amy Tan
75. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero
76. “Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.” — Andre Gide
77. “What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what’s behind them”.— Augusto Roa Bastos
78. “Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
79. “My memories are inside me – they’re not things or a place – I can take them anywhere.” — Olivia Newton-John
80. “Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.” — Maurice Baring
81. “Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head.” — Harold Brodkey
82. “Your body actually reminds you about your age and your injuries – the body has a stronger memory than your mind.” — Mikhail Baryshnikov
83. “History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
84. “Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.” — Antoine Rivarol
85. “Observation is an old man’s memory.” — Jonathan Swift
86. “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero
87. “One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” — Antonio Porchia
88. “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” — Walter Benjamin
89. “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” — Walter Benjamin
90. “Home is one’s birthplace, ratified by memory.” — Henry Anatole Grunwald
91. “Time moves in one direction, memory in another.” — William Gibson
92. “A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.” — George Herbert
93. “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.” — Michel de Montaigne
94. “Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly.” — Candice Bergen
95. “A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.” — Elbert Hubbard
96. “Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory.” — Marjorie Holmes
97. “Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I’ve always been interested in that.” — Alice McDermott
98. “Creditors have better memories than debtors.” — Benjamin Franklin
99. “I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.” — Charlie Kaufman
100. “In memory everything seems to happen to music.” — Tennessee Williams
101. “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” — Salvador Dali
102. “Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.” — Lewis B. Smedes
103. “There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.” — Gilbert Parker
104. “The memory is like a cat scratching my heart.” — Marina Oswald
105. “I believe the true function of age is memory. I’m recording as fast as I can.” — Rita Mae Brown
106. “Language is memory and metaphor.” — Storm Jameson
107. “Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.” — Georges Duhamel
108. “Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.” — Lionel Hampton
109. “Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.” — James Martineau
110. “You never know when you’re making a memory.” — Rickie Lee Jones
111. “Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” — John Irving
112. “Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.” — Oscar Wilde
113. “Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age.” — Lactantius
114. “You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.” — Franklin P. Jones
115. “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” — Willa Cather
116. “Hope has a good memory, gratitude a bad one.” — Baltasar Gracian
117. “Memory is more indelible than ink.” — Anita Loos
118. “Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.” — Andre Maurois
119. “A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.” — Alexander Smith
120. “It’s been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.” — Bob Kane
121. “Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.” — William Godwin
122. “Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.” — Tobias Wolff
123. “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” — Aeschylus
124. “I hope that memory is valued – that we do not lose memory.” — Studs Terkel
125. “Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
126. “Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
127. “You don’t have to hold on to the pain, to hold on to the memory.” — Janet Jackson
128. “A good memory is needed after one has lied.” — Pierre Corneille
129. “Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.” Daniel Keys Moran
130. “History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” — Lord Acton
131. “Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.” — Alice Munro
132. “A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.” — Edward de Bono
133. “A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.” — Gustave Flaubert
134. “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.” — Barbara Kingsolver
135. “There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.” — Josh Billings
136. “Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.” — Victor Hugo
137. “Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero
138. “Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
139. “Memories are doing funny things to us.” — Milos Forman
140. “Memory is the thing you forget with.” — Alexander Chase
141. “Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.” — Thomas Fuller
