Memory Quotes – 4

“But words are things, a small drop of ink,
falling like dew upon a thought,
produces that which makes thousands,
perhaps millions, think.” – Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)

Martin Luther King, Jnr. - quotes

Martin Luther King, Jnr. Known for his oratory rather than any literary work. In his short life he changed modern sociey profoundly.

I do hope you’re enjoying these memory quotes. I’ve tried to be very selective in gathering together some particularly interesting and meaningful memory quotes for these few pages. It would have been very easy to vacuum up entire pages of them from various sites, but then, what would that achieve … except to demonstrate that I’ve finally mastered the esoteric art of cut-and-paste.

Some of them are enlightening (I hope), some at least make you think, some are touched with nostalgia for days gone by, or a mostly forgotten childhood, or ‘the good old days’ (were they?) … and some are just so well constructed that, in just a few well chosen words, they convey more meaning than some writers manage in twenty pages or more.

And why the comments? Because I chose these particular quotes, and naturally enough I’ve got my own thoughts about them, which I thought might be worth sharing. Now they’re yours, and you’ll have your own thoughts on them too, and indeed on my comments.


Wouldn’t you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don’t have to look everything up and remember everything? – Kevin J. Anderson

This is not such a strange idea anymore. Pretty soon they might be able to remember it wholesale for you, like in fiction. Until then, I guess we should just go on trying to harness this astonishing mental faculty through the use of traditional memory techniques, and anything else we can come up with.


Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children – Charles R. Swindoll

And if we remembered this and little else, what exemplary parents we would make.


Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.

Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. – Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Smell does indeed seem to be the most effective trigger of memories. Sometimes, walking into a room, the particular mixture of smells combine to trigger a ‘land mine’ of memories, as the author puts it, and this seems (to me anyway) to happen much more often than with sights and sounds. Smell has a hair-trigger touch on memory, it seems, and yet, when do we actually make any effort to memorise the smells associated with any situation?

I guess this underlines the idea that we should try to employ all our senses when we’re trying to memorise something. If it happens anyway, unbidden, it can’t be that hard.


It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory Edgar Degas

When you can benefit from a collaboration of memory and imagination, then you truly are on the verge of creating something unique.


Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing. –Joshua Reynolds

I’m not so sure. The theory sounds good, but there are times when inspiration steps in, and at those times one just knows that something extraordinary has happened … something entirely outside of yourself has lent a hand. And that helping hand often comes when its help is most needed.


History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals – Malcom X

True enough – a person’s memory is a priceless possession and the losing of it a catastrophe, but no less so for a people. When a dictator tries to wipe away a culture, he is, scalpel in hand, performing a lobotomy on an entire people, in the hope that they’ll be left mindlessly following his every pronouncement.


We know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can’t unlock it and, essentially, wipe out what’s there – J. Michael Straczynski

The relentless advance of science … it can leave you breathlessly looking forward to a dazzling future, or fearful of what it may bring.


Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy.- Seth Lloyd

Ah, I see, yes … and I can assume that this particular model will come with an inbuilt safety device of the kind that the United States military have been secretly working on for quite some time, yes? 🙂


No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations. – Louis L’Amour

And it’s following these trails that brings up ever more memories … an adventure of the mind that need never end.


As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species – that means all known and recorded information – is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years – Dee Hock

Hold on tight, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride! And none of us know for sure, not one of us, whether we’ll be better off when we arrive … or infinitely worse off.


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