Famous Quotes & Sayings

Francesco Guicciardini

There is nothing so fleeting as the memory of benefits received.

Francis Bacon

Men ought to find the difference between saltiness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others' memory.

Francis Bacon

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Francis Bacon

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Francis Bacon

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

Frances Mayes

Memory is, of course, a trickster.

Frances Mayes

The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.

Frances Mayes

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

Frances Mayes

Although I am a person who expected to be rooted in one spot forever, as it has turned out I love having the memories of living in many places.

George Washington

If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory, you will be thought on with respect, veneration, and affection by your sincere friend.

George Santayana

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

George Santayana

Memory... is an internal rumor.

George Santayana

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

George Santayana

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

George Santayana

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

George Santayana

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

George Santayana

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

George Santayana

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

George Orwell

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Know that I've forgotten precisely nothing; but I've driven it all out of my head for a time, even the memories--until I've radically improved my circumstances. Then...then you'll see, I'll rise from the dead!

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honour or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together united by a good and kind feeling which made us perhaps better than we are.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays & the soft tender gentle memories that come with them...’ -Father Zossima

Fyodor Dostoevsky

If man has one good memory to go by, that may be enough to save him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age: I bless the sun's rising each day and my heart sings to it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories, dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life--and over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!

Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.

Chris Ware

Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.

Chris Hondros

We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

Chris Hayes

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

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.

George W. Bush

Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It's a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It's also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend-even a friend whose name it never knew.

George W. Bush

We salute our veterans of Pearl Harbor and World War II, whose sacrifices saved democracy during a dark hour. In their memory, a new generation of our Armed Forces goes forward against new enemies in a new era. Once again, we pledge to defend freedom, secure our homeland, and advance peace around the world. Americans have been tested before, and our Nation will triumph again.

George W. Bush

Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened that day, and to whom it happened. We'll remember the moment the news came -- where we were and what we were doing. Some will remember an image of a fire, or a story of rescue. Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.

George Sutherland

Do the people of this land…desire to preserve those [liberties] protected by the First Amendment… If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanquished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch for a saving hand while yet there was time.