memory quotes

  • If a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, hehad need have a present wit; and if he read little he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.50,'Of Studies'.

  • I bequeath my soul to God† For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      From his will.

  • For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, thememoryof Macaulay, thefigure of Juno, and thehide of a rhinoceros.

    - Ethel Barrymore
    Quoted in George  Jean Nathan The Theatre in the Fifties (1953).

  • L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce'  s, fatigue et tension de me  moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

    - Roland Barthes
      Fragments d'un discours amoureux.

  • Good music isthat whichpenetratesthe ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

    - SirThomas Beecham
      Television broadcast,17 Nov.

  • The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

    -John Peter Berger
      New Statesman,17  Aug.

  • For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog isbetter thana dead lion.For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Ecclesiastes 9:4^5.

  •    'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

    -Dodgson
    Through the Looking-Glass, ch.5,'Wool and Water'.

  • I amyet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes.

    -John Clare
      'I  Am'.

  • In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.

    -Constantinus
      The Arrow of Gold, author's note. AD Roman Emperor, who adoptedChristianity c.312 AD. He founded a  royal  residence  at  Byzantium  (Constantinople),  an  act  of great historical importance.

  • It is all very well to copy what you see; it is much better to draw what you see only in memory.

    - (Hilaire Germain) Edgar Degas
    Quoted in R H Ives Gammell The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961).

  • Par toi tout le bonheur que m'offre l'avenir Est dans mon souvenir. Through you, all the happiness that the future offers Is in my memory.

    - Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
      EŁ   legies, Marie et romances,'Le Souvenir'.

  •    Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

    -Joan Didion
      Run River, ch.4.

  • Ce n'est que par la me  moire que nous sommes un me"  me individu pour les autres et pour nous-me"  mes. Il ne me reste peut-e"  tre pas, a'   l'a"  ge quej'ai, une seule mole  cule du corps que j'apportai en naissant. It is only in memory that we are the same person for others and for ourselves. At the age I am now, there is probably not a single molecule of my body that I had when born.

    - Denis Diderot
      Discours sur la poe  sie dramatique.

  • Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations Its divisions and precisions.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Prufrock and Other Observations,'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.

  • Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Prufrock and Other Observations,'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.

  • April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      The Waste Land, pt.1,'The Burial of the Dead'.

  • Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.1.

  • This is the use of memory: For liberationnot less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.3.

  • I have but one request to make at my departure from this world, it isthe charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives, dare now vindicate them, let no prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace! Let my memory be left in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justicetomycharacter.Whenmycountry takesher place among thenations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

    - Robert Emmet
      Speech before being sentenced.

  • The way you wear your hat, The way you sip your tea, The mem'ry of all that No, no! They can't take that away from me!

    - Ira originally Israel Gershowitz Gershwin
      'They Can't  Take That  Away from Me', song from the film musical Shall We Dance? (music by George Gershwin).

  • Of those four winters which I passed in Indo-China opium has left the happiest memory.

    - (Henry) Graham Greene
      The Quiet  American, introduction.

  • Las grandes bellezas de la creacio  n no pueden a un tiempo ser vistas y cantadas: es necesario que vuelvan al alma empalidecidas por la memoria infiel. The most beautiful things on earth cannot be seen and sung at the same time: they must return to the soul weakened by unfaithful memory.

    -Jorge Isaacs
      Mar|  a, ch.2 (translated as Mar|  a:  A South  American Romance,1977).

  • There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose anoldmandecayed inhisintellects.Ifayoungor middle- aged man, when leaving a company, does not recollect where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered inanold man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say,'His memory isgoing.'

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.4.

  • I remember that the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been,Would he had blotted a thousand: which they thought a malevolent speech†[but] I loved themanand do honour hismemory, on thisside idolatry, as much as any.

    - Ben Jonson
    Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (published 1640).

  • 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      Traffics and Discoveries,'Mrs Bathhurst'.

  • All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness.

    - Penelope (Margaret) Lively
      Oleander,  Jacaranda, ch.3.

  • A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues, that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.

    -John Milton
      Comus,  A Mask, l.204^8.

  • Now conscience wakes despair That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

    -John Milton
      Of Satan. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.4, l.23^6.

  • If I be evil intreated, or sent away with a flea in mine ear, let him look that Iwill rail onhimsoundly; nor foranhour or a day, whiles the injury is fresh in my memory; but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to all ages of his beggarly parsimony and ignoble illiberality.

    -Thomas Nashe
      Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil, 'An Invective Against Enemies of Poetry'.

  • Thanks for the Memory.

    - Leo Robin
      Title of song, which became Bob Hope's signature tune. Music by Ralph Rainger.

  • Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years.

    - Christina Georgina Rossetti
      Goblin Market and Other Poems,'Echo'.

  • Life is not easy. I paint the memory of happiness.

    - Anvar Saifoutdinov
    Quoted by M S Mason in Christian Science Monitor,19 Nov1992.

  • You have no part with lads who fought And laughed and suffered at my side. Your fugues and symphonies have brought No memory of my friends who died.

    - Siegfried Louvain Sassoon
      'Dead Musicians'.

  • Music when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    'To: Music when soft voices die' (published1824).

  • [This] much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet, and, when you die, your memorydie fromthe earth for want of an epigraph.

    - Sir Philip Sidney
      The Defence of Poetry.

  • Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      General election campaign speech, Bolton, 2 May.

  • She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

    - D(onald) M(itchell) Thomas
    TheWhite Hotel, ch.4.

  • Bankers'genes were Wall St. genes, especially in the big cities. If the banks were conservative just now [1955], it was because bankers still awoke in the middle of the night, trembling and sweaty with thoughts of the Crash. But intimeanewgenerationwouldtake over: ambitious, overcompetitive young men to whom1929 would be merelya date on a page; such menwould sever theroots of memory as if with an ax, not realizing that those tendrils were also the rudder cables.

    - Michael M Thomas
      The Ropespinner Conspiracy.

  • We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

    - Henry David Thoreau
      Journal entry,19 Feb.

  • Theyare all gone into the world of light, And I alone sit lingering here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.

    - Henry Vaughan
      Silex Scintillans,'TheyAreAll Gone'.

  • Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      Omeros, bk.2, ch.24, section 2.

  • No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Lord Illingworth. AWoman of No Importance, act 3.

  • In memory everything seems to happen to music.

    -TennesseeThomas Lanier Williams
      Tom.The Glass Menagerie, sc.1.

  • Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.

    -TennesseeThomas Lanier Williams
      Mrs Goforth.The MilkTrain Doesn't Stop HereAnymore, sc.3

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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