Top 100 Quotes About Memory Of The Past
#1. Don't live in regret! It is such a useless idea.
Use the memory to prevent us do bad things!
Regret is a childish wish, or an empty hope,
trying to revise the bitter memory of the past.
Toba Beta
#2. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.
Madame De Stael
#3. There is no judgment upon you; there is no memory of the past; there is only the understanding of this moment.
Joel Goldsmith
#4. The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
Gregory Maguire
#5. The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.
Jean-Henri Fabre
#6. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
William James
#7. If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.
Pope Francis
#9. You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.
Pope Francis
#10. History is the diary of humankind; to forget it is to try to navigate the future with no memory of the past.
T.L. Rese
#11. If the brain is a prediction engine, memory is its fuel. We can argue that the only reason we need memory of the past is so we can inform the future.
Carmen Simon
#12. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery. I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.
Bruce Lee
#13. It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.
Nicolas Chamfort
#14. I am afraid I am not quite so much the man of the world as might be good for me in some points. My feelings are not quite so evanescent, nor my memory of the past under such easy dominion as one finds to be the case with men of the world.
Jane Austen
#15. The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter ... gave rise to fresh insights.
Ivan Klima
#16. Misfortune comes to people who live only on the memory of their past grandeur.
Louise Colet
#17. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#18. Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.
Charles Dudley Warner
#19. It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
Ally Condie
#20. Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can't let go of the past.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#21. There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.
Leo Tolstoy
#22. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.
Daniel Kahneman
#23. Memory is that trick by which we see the awful events of the past loom over the good, like mountains over mouse. We don't recall life as it was. Instead, we remember what was different, frightening, or strange, and we turn our lives into the fun-house mirror images of the truth.
Jamie Kain
#24. 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
#25. God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it
Jim Cymbala
#26. The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
Jonathan Lethem
#27. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#28. For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The
Soren Kierkegaard
#29. In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory
John Connolly
#30. Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.
James Luceno
#31. The older I got the more I appreciated the role of travel as a stimulus to memories, and the way in which journeys even to new places were somehow always awakening memories of places seen in an ever-receding past.
Michael Jacobs
#32. ...Past joys and achievements give us the outlines of how to get to a state of happiness again. That memory is a treasure that can never be taken away. At least we know where we were, what we have lost, what we miss and what more to add to our experiences.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#33. It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.
Fay Weldon
#34. Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#35. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#36. I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to
Edwidge Danticat
#37. Habit is formed out of memory ... We often shape our present situation according to those habitual memories. Instead of starting fresh, we go back to what we've done in the past ... easier for us than fighting our way through foreign territory.
Chogyam Trungpa
#38. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.
Oscar Wilde
#39. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
#40. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
#41. But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her,
Monique Martin
#42. For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships ... Other islands fade as I brood upon them.
Chuma Nwokolo
#44. 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
#45. When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)
Victoria Moran
#46. It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.
Marcel Proust
#47. Memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.
Colm Toibin
#48. 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
#49. She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.
Harriet Evans
#50. The rich of this world will vanish like smoke, and no memory of their past pleasures will remain. But even in their lifetime they do not enjoy them without bitterness, weariness and fear, for the very things whence they derive their pleasures often carry with them the seeds of sorrow.
Thomas A Kempis
#51. Yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Jamaica Kincaid
#52. At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past.
F. Sionil Jose
#53. I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.
Corey Mesler
#54. Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.
Cesar Aira
#55. Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.
- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Yukio Mishima
#56. Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Milan Kundera
#57. I note that I've lived longer in the past now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting more of it.
Denis Johnson
#58. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
Rollo May
#59. The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
#60. 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 Thatcher
#61. On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#63. Remembering God's work in the past has a sustaining and renewing effect during times of spiritual drought. Memory and worship are thus keys to a long life of spiritual formation. Try
Richard J. Foster
#64. Reframing your past painful experiences and seeing them in a humorous light takes away the power and emotional charge attached to the memory of the hurtful event.
Miya Yamanouchi
#65. A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
#66. I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.
Desmond Tutu
#67. Was the dementia of old age a blessing in disguise? No more thoughts. No more damage inflicted. No more memories of damage survived.
Janet Turpin Myers
#68. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events t give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.
John Steinbeck
#69. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Paul Theroux
#70. it was not even imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum, prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which I look back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. To
C.S. Lewis
#71. Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.
Jaggi Vasudev
#72. At times Sophie sang songs for her that she had learned on the streets. Sometimes she still remembered verses that her parents had sung for her before they died. But they were only scraps, fragments from the past, linked to the hazy memory of a friendly face or laughter.
Anonymous
#73. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.
Indu Muralidharan
#74. Desiree. It's like falling in love every night and having your heart broken every morning ... Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past.
Craig Clevenger
#75. And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind
Jacques Roubaud
#76. Most of the time, life is all "What's next?" "Who's next?" "Where the HELL am I going, please?" But on anniversaries, you take the time to stop and look back and it's like watching a play of your past dance across your memory. At
Holly Bourne
#77. Over the past seven years she had managed to push his memory so far back in her mind that he could've been a figment of her imagination.
Vivian Winslow
#78. Memory is that element in our consciousness that connects the past with the present. If we had no memory, there would be only one moment of our life, the moment we call now, and we would never consciously recognize more than this single moment.
Gustaf Stromberg
#79. I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.
Bertrand Russell
#80. This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was.
Jenim Dibie
#81. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.
John Shelby Spong
#82. Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri Hustvedt
#83. The memory of things become the reality of things.
Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has
said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves.
Richard Jackson
#84. Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.
Rabindranath Tagore
#85. 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
#86. Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.
Don DeLillo
#87. Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.
Ron Rash
#88. Its not that he didn't appreciate his dishwasher. There was something about washing dishes by hand that was therapeutic, as if he could wash away the regrets of the past and photos he wanted to wipe out of his memory forever.
James L. Rubart
#89. If we live out of our memory, we're tied to the past and to that which is finite. When we live out of our imagination,
we're tied to that which is infinite.
Stephen Covey
#90. Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!
Ashim Shanker
#91. 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
#92. Memory is not a simple replay. The bits of information that we recover from the past are often influenced by our knowledge, beliefs and feelings.
Daniel Schacter
#93. This is the time to make those hard decisions and let things go. Ask yourself, "Is this item part of my past or my future?" If it's sentimental, take a picture and let it go! Save the memory in a picture, but not on your shelf.
Marcia Ramsland
#94. The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
#95. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
#96. Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.
Paulo Coelho
#97. It's my choice today that is the memory of tomorrow. It's my choice that determines what I will become. Not the memories of the past.
Sharon Cameron
#98. For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
Eduardo Galeano
#99. Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.
Katherine Center
#100. The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
Paul Brunton
