Bertrand Russell Quotes

Memory. My poison, my food.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

And never forget, there is memory.

Memory is useful because it gives us a sense of continuity. But memory is also imprisoning because it conditions us in predictable ways.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

Remembering is a great invention of the mind.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Memory feeds imagination.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.