Jane Austen Quotes

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

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

If you take five taxis a day, one driver will be nasty, and the other four are perfectly nice. You remember the nasty one. But you should remember the four who were nice.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

I never forget a friend.

Hold on to your friends. Resist - or move on Be mad, be rash Smoke and explode Sell all of your clothes Just bear in mind: There just might come a time When you need some friends

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

We're not really afraid to die. We're only afraid of being forgotten. We know that we'll be forgotten, and the idea is unbearable, don't you agree? As time passes we become infrequent visitors in the minds of those left behind. The ones who clear out the house & divide up the belongings. Throw away the rubbish. And forget. If we knew that every evening someone lit a candle and sat down to think – thought about is if only for a few seconds – then we could depart this earth in peace. No-one will light a candle for me. Who would do that?

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.