Leo Tolstoy Quotes

What does it remember like?

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

memory is the only way home.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

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

It’s not the body that people love, but the soul. The body is a temporary vehicle. Without the soul, the body is like a car without a driver. I see through my eyes, smell through my nose, taste through my tongue, hear through my ears, feel through my skin, think through my brain, and love through my heart. But who am I? Who is the witness, enjoyer and sufferer that activates my body?

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

The problem is we think we exist.

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

[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.

I do know who you are. I just needed to be reminded.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself.

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most people?

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Although we think of them as extraordinary, miracles also streak across our consciousness every day. We can choose to notice or ignore them, unaware that our destinies may hang in the balance. Tune into the presence of miracles, and in an instant, life can be transformed into a dazzling experience, more wondrous and exciting than we could even imagine. Ignore it, and an opportunity is gone forever.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it.

Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are.