Samuel Johnson Quotes

Memory is satisfied desire.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.

What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

I watched her and I watched the birds' shadows flit across her face, and I...wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house.

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.

Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.

I could still smell her on my fur. It clung to me, a memory of another world. I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I'd got too close. The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness. Too close. I couldn't stay away.

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

Women and elephants never forget.

Oh foolish desires of mortals! How weak are the reasons that lead us to not take off our flight from the ground.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

Oh, I see;" said the Tin Woodman. "But, after all, brains are not the best things in the world." Have you any?" enquired the Scarecrow. No, my head is quite empty," answered the Woodman; "but once I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.

To bliss unknown by lofty soul aspires, My lot unequal to my vast desires.

The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously remembered pleasure.

We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.