Human Memory Quotes

#1. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#2. Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

Alice Dreger

#3. If you take another lover, Elena" - he thrust back in, making her gasp - "what I do to him will become a nightmare etched in human memory.

Nalini Singh

#4. Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.

Ursula Goodenough

#5. Sins that have been completely absolved on one occasion sometimes on other occasions cannot be completely forgotten or set aside. They may continue to have a ripple effect. But it is comforting to realize that they are no longer remembered by God, even if traces remain in human memory.

Thomas C. Oden

#6. I'd love a super human memory. My memory has never been good.

Wale

#7. One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we'd love to see (again) for the first time.

Chuck Klosterman

#8. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

Joshua Foer

#9. The human memory is such a cruel, frustrating thing, the way it just discards things without asking permission, precious things. At least here, in my house, I have control over my memories.

Lisa Jewell

#10. Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.

Katherine Center

#11. I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Gordon Bell

#12. We're defining the competitive landscape ... of who can provide the most supportive services that make life easier, keep track of things, that complement human memory in a way that helps us get things done,

Eric Horvitz

#13. Art - the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

Lawrence Durrell

#14. Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

Jerome Bruner

#15. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

Mark Twain

#16. We don't know exactly how this memory works. We think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. Researchers also don't know exactly how the human memory works. They think it is the sum total of several complex biochemical reactions and interactions. The

Hope Jahren

#17. Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

William, Saroyan

#18. 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

#19. Such is human memory ... you forget the truth and believe what makes you feel better.

Rick Riordan

#20. Whether he is aware of it or not, every human being dwells in tradition and history. Human memory is this constant dwelling in tradition. It constitutes that fundamental human characteristic of historicity.

Medard Boss

#21. What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

Thomas Carlyle

#22. Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

Janine Di Giovanni

#23. When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to aging, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall.

Kevin Warwick

#24. It was just the same old familiar moon. The one and only satellite that has faithfully circled the earth, at the same speed, from before human memory.

Haruki Murakami

#25. For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

Stant Litore

#26. The book, and its offspring the periodical, which hold more knowledge than one human memory can retain, have long served as extensions to human memories.

Frederick G. Kilgour

#27. They live in human memory, man. That's what keeps them alive.

Rick Riordan

#28. Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy - sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

Ramez Naam

#29. That's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race, memory.

Ovid

#30. Memory is a time capsule; it records the wounds inflicted upon human consciousness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#31. I like very human stories that venture into sci-fi or the supernatural or areas that I think occupy a lot of space in our collective memory for the films that we loved as children.

Colin Trevorrow

#32. Time is our delight and our prison. It binds all human beings together, since we all share the pleasures and burdens of memory, and we all know the anticipation of cherished goals and the dark prospect of personal mortality.

Francesco Petrarca

#33. The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.

E.L. Doctorow

#34. This is the biggest cemetery for Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti. It must tell us that we have to come back here again and again. We must keep the memory of the worst crime in human history alive for those who were born later.

Horst Kohler

#35. How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Vladimir Nabokov

#36. With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

Elie Wiesel

#37. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

David Mitchell

#38. A life is bookended by forgetting, as though memory forms the tunnel that leads into and out of a human body.

Sarah Hepola

#39. Mourning is one of the most profound human experiences that it is possible to have ... The deep capacity to weep for the loss of a loved one and to continue to treasure the memory of that loss is one of our noblest human traits.

Edwin S. Shneidman

#40. Things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

Denis Johnson

#41. There is a hopeless longing for nostalgia that pervades the human soul, a return to the warm glow of remembrance or some imagined past.

Deborah L. Norris

#42. The abilities distinctive of human beings are abilities of intellect and will. The relevant abilities of intellect are thought, imagination (the cogitative and creative imagination rather than the image-generating faculty), personal (experiential) and factual memory, reasoning and selfconsciousness.

P.M.S. Hacker

#43. What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

Delmore Schwartz

#44. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?

Thomas Pynchon

#45. If human beings really grasped how synthetic their world was - how much of it was stitched together not from direct perception, but from interpolation, memory, educated guesswork - they would go quietly mad.

Alastair Reynolds

#46. One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

Ida Tarbell

#47. If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.

Douglas Rushkoff

#48. But he has still a vague memory that he was a human once,

J.M. Barrie

#49. In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana

#50. I shook my head back and forth as though I was a human etch-a-sketch, erasing the memory.

Nicole Gulla

#51. Dogs remember every favor you ever do for them and store those events in a memory bank titled Why My Human Is A God.

Roger Ebert

#52. It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world - sights, sounds, smells - into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.

Noah Hawley

#53. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

John Steinbeck

#54. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

Siri Hustvedt

#55. Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work.

Rumi

#56. While most things require money to invest in,
with efforts toward uncertain market shares maintained.
Friendship is something your heart invests in,
with priceless returns shared, in warm memory, remain.

Tom Althouse

#57. Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna's estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it.

Ivan Turgenev

#58. Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

Hilary Mantel

#59. The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.

Rick Yancey

#60. A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Joshua Foer

#61. Noah Czerny had died. This was all that was left. That was the truth. Blue's body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.

Maggie Stiefvater

#62. A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

Simon Schama

#63. We must treasure our memories just as we cherish our dreams because without dreams and memory human life would be sad, brutal, and meaningless.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#64. Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.

Frederick Buechner

#65. In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

Nick Harkaway

#66. He dreamed, as human beings always dream - random firings of memory and imagination that the unconscious mind tries to put together into coherent stories. Bean rarely paid attention to his own dreams, rarely even remembered that he dreamed at all. But

Orson Scott Card

#67. I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.

Mark Twain

#68. In a future time when most human thought has been accelerated by artificial intelligence and external memory can be shared on a universal matrix... GITS 2

Masaki Yamada

#69. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.
Because they have no memory ... because they are not human.

Herman Melville

#70. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#71. How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.

Don DeLillo

#72. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay only once for every mistake they make. But not us. We have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves.

Miguel Ruiz

#73. What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

George R R Martin

#74. The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#75. Through using our memory to its fullest we can unlock the vast reservoir of human potential that isn't currently being used.

Tony Buzan

#76. Everyone has experienced laughing at a funeral, and not even inappropriately. It could be a response to a moment of absurdity or some fond memory. We're human beings so we understand that laughter and crying aren't always disparate emotions.

Harold Ramis

#77. No man stops caring as long as he breathes. As long as he has a mind and memory, he will care. This is what separates us from the animals. We have feelings.

F. Sionil Jose

#78. Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

Samuel Johnson

#79. The human mind was a devious organ, however, and it chiseled in stone that which would be best left unrecalled.

Raymond L. Atkins

#80. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.

Anne Bogart

#81. Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet

Frans De Waal

#82. Human working memory is able to hold no more than some four or five chunks of information at any given time.

Nick Bostrom

#83. Vampires did not kill indiscriminately. They took blood when they needed it and left the human donor with no memory of the

J.S. Scott

#84. The reason we know as human beings that pictures have to be focused before you take the shot is because we know if we're not focusing our eyes on something that happens, then it's too late - you can't go searching in your memory to find it because that light never struck your mind.

Ren Ng

#85. The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.

Ben Brantley

#86. History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.

Saul Bellow

#87. I'm all through as a human being," she said. "All you're looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I'm just functioning by rote memory.

Haruki Murakami

#88. There are several ways. You can think of a memory from before you came into your powers. Or focus on a time when your felt particularly strong human emotions: jealousy, fear, love..."
"What do you think about?"
Setting his glasses on his nose, he replied, "Your mother.

Rachel Hawkins

#89. Even knowing, as I do now, that grace, power, and, yes, love can hide the darkest elements of the human heart, I would do it all again.

Chelsey Philpot

#90. The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

Giacomo Casanova

#91. Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,
the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.
I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

Jeffrey McDaniel

#92. We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.

Eduardo Galeano

#93. Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees ... and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.

George Eastman

#94. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

Peter Watts

#95. The darkest moments of our lives are not to be buried and forgotten, rather they are a memory to be called upon for inspiration to remind us of the unrelenting human spirit and our capacity to overcome the intolerable

Vince Lombardi

#96. When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ]

George Oppen

#97. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

Arthur Miller

#98. How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human's life and soul.

Stephen King

#99. It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death.

Herbert Mason

#100. The human brain is fascinating; we will forget a scent until we smell it again, we will erase a voice from our memory until we hear it again,and even emotions that seemed buried forever will be awakened when we return to the same place.

Paulo Coelho