Quotes About Memory

You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.

When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

What does it remember? Itself, death as memory. An immense memory in which one dies. First to forget. To remember only where one remembers nothing. To forget: to remember everything as though by way of forgetting. There is a profoundly forgotten point from which every memory radiates. Everything is exalted in memory from something which is forgotten, an infinitesimal detail, a minuscule fissure into which it passes in its entirety.

Whoever wants to remember himself must entrust himself to forgetfulness, to the risk that absolute forgetfulness is, and the beautiful chance that memory then becomes.

Povera camera, sei mai stata abitata? Come fa freddo qui, come ti abito poco. Ci sto forse per cancellare tutte le tracce del mio soggiorno? Di nuovo, di nuovo, camminando e rimanendo sempre qui, un altro paese, altre città, altre strade, lo stesso paese.

Youth fills the time to come with imagination; old age relives the past through memory. The two things are equivalent.

Beside London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio at Florence seemed but a mere trifle in Guccio's memory, and the Arno a brook compared with the Thames. He said so to his companion. 'All the same we teach them everything,' the latter replied.

The Creator was immensely wise and charitable when He forbade us knowledge of the future, while He has vouchsafed us the delights of memory and the enchantments of hope.

Es error común de los humanos creer que el prójimo concede a su persona tanta importancia como cada uno se da a sí mismo; los demás, a no ser que tengan interés particular en el recuerdo, olvidan rápidamente lo que nos ha ocurrido, y si no lo han olvidado, su recuerdo no tiene la firmeza que imaginamos.

We are all apt to fall into the error of assuming that other people think we are as important as we do ourselves; but unless there is some particular reason for their remembering it, others forget what has happened to us very quickly; and, even if they have not forgotten, their memories attach much less weight to it than we are inclined to believe.

worse than amnesia, the loss of all memory. It is the chaotic falsification of memory. Dementia.

Il n'y pas de mort. Je peux fermer les yeux, j'aurai mon paradis dans les coeurs qui se souviendront.

In each epoch memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society.

Mais nous croyons que l'esprit reconstruit ses souvenirs sous la pression de la société. . . que celle-ci le détermine à transfigurer ainsi le passé . . // But we believe that the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society. . . that this causes the mind to transfigure the past . . .

tout semble indiquer qu'il [le passé] ne se conserve pas, mais qu'on le reconstruit en partant du présent.

We are face to face with reality now; let us look at it well and pronounce our sentence; for this is the moment when we hold the proofs in our hands, when the elements of crime are hot before us and shout out the truth that soon will fade from our memory.

Het verleden is altijd tegenwoordig. (The past is always present.)

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love—which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others—call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

Any commemoration is also a betrayal.

The analysis of movement leads him to recognize that in every instant of movement there is a conatus toward an ulterior becoming, a something-in-motion making a circular trajectory that has a kind of memory

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.

Verflechtung(interweaving, entanglement with others). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives upon a surveyor's plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. Make a chapter in my book: Being and Memory (memory as a particular case of inter-being).