Top 100 The Past Is A Memory Quotes
#1. The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love - or any other experience - must take place in the present.
Jack Kornfield
#2. People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?
Jeanette Winterson
#3. Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind.
Isabel Allende
#4. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.
Ian McEwan
#5. Memory is fiction ... All memory is a way of reconstructing the past ... The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]
Damon Galgut
#6. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Tennessee Williams
#7. How blazing and alive the past is. The color of the wallpaper in the bedroom you had as a girl. It's not so much that you've lost your memory, more like you're submerged in it, like you're living in the brightly vivid underwater world of the past.
Jackie Kay
#8. The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.
Julio Cortazar
#9. The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, "Then was then, now is now", is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth.
Pope Francis
#10. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me.
Gottfried Benn
#11. The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful; but it soon fades away. The in memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
#12. The past was a lie, memory has no return, every spring gone by could never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#13. We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.
Norman Lock
#14. She is more memory than reality. She belongs to a time of teenage crushes, first kisses, crowded lecture halls and smoky pubs. Even if she had lived, we might have had nothing in common except the past.
Michael Robotham
#15. 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
#16. Our past is a fictional representation, and the only thing we can be even somewhat sure of is what is happening now. It encourages us to live in the moment and not to place too much importance on our past. It forces us to accept that the best time of our lives, and our memory, is right now. And
Julia Shaw
#17. Alan Watts, the Buddhist scholar, proposed the existence of a mental faculty he called forgettory, which is the flip side of memory. There are times, Watts maintained, when we need to forget things, to let them slip away into the unremembered past.
Larry Dossey
#18. Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest in the grave of things over and done with. As long as our minds are captive to the memory of having been wronged, they are not free to wish for reconciliation with the one who wronged us.
Lewis B. Smedes
#19. The magnitude of any one day is compromised by its passing quickly into the next, a mere moment in time which soon fades into the collective memory of our past.
Timothy W. Tron
#20. [Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.
Elie Wiesel
#21. One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything that makes others happy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#22. Gardener's , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.
Allen Lacy
#23. To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to live the life of a child forever. For what is a man's life, unless woven into the life of our ancestors by the memory of past deeds?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#24. An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.
Barbara Kingsolver
#25. I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame.
Lydia Millet
#26. He past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?..
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
#27. Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
Thomas Carlyle
#28. It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#29. The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.
Madeline Claire Franklin
#30. Perhaps, if we don't always have a conscious conscience, we have a subliminal one, from which the memory of past wrongs is not so easily erased.
Eva Hoffman
#31. I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
Isabel Allende
#32. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present.
Oswald Chambers
#33. A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
Fawn M. Brodie
#34. There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present.
Justin Cronin
#35. The child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past.
Cormac McCarthy
#36. I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past ... but forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory.
Martha Beck
#37. Sometimes those experiences crowd back upon the memory, and the past flashes back like a distant peak momentarily lighted up by sunbeam piercing through the clouds. Then oblivion again. Strange it is how the prosaic present may hide the exciting past.
Whipplesnaith
#38. To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#39. Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
Frank McCourt
#40. The past is a hotel. You can visit any time; enjoy the view. But you can't live there. The cost is to high.
B.J. Neblett
#41. Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#42. Like a dream,
Whatever I enjoy
Will become a memory;
The past is not revisited.
Santideva
#43. If the process don't transfer, they cannot even be called thinking. They can be called learning, memory, or habit, but not thinking. The purpose of a course on thinking is to enhance student's abilities to face new challenges and to attack novel problems confidently, rationally and productively.
Marilyn Jager Adams
#44. 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
#45. But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#47. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.
Stanley Kauffmann
#49. Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
Robert Penn Warren
#50. All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
Daniel Kahneman
#51. Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Walter Benjamin
#53. 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
#54. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, mage. The past is for the memory, the present is for the mind.
Ben Galley
#55. The ghost's eyes clouded for a moment, by memory or regret. "Past speaks to the future," she said. "The present is already crumbling.
Ekaterina Sedia
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Inside the museums, | Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
Bob Dylan
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind
Jacques Roubaud
#66. 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
#67. But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.
Marcel Proust
#68. 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
#69. ...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
#70. The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.
Michel Patini
#71. That the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#72. I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.
Richard Paul Evans
#74. 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
#75. Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.
Daniel Alarcon
#76. 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
#77. Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.
Edward R. Murrow
#78. Love in the past is only a memory. Love in the future is only a fantasy. True love lives in the here and now.
Gautama Buddha
#79. 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
#80. Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I've built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don't understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren't from here, but that are so real.
Elizabeth Scott
#81. 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
#82. The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#83. Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties.
Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.
Gregory Maguire
#84. Stop trying to be a magician. The past won't come back. It likes its safety in memory.
Adib Khan
#85. 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
#86. In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.
Kevin Systrom
#88. The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.
Rupert Sheldrake
#89. The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
Vladimir Nabokov
#90. Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.
Richard Linklater
#91. Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.
Katherine Center
#92. For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.
Eduardo Galeano
#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. 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
#95. Don't dwell on the PAST as it is a memory ... But dream for the Future as it is a hope
Blake Hahn
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
