David Hume Quotes

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

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

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

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

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

It's like your children talking about holidays, you find they have a quite different memory of it from you. Perhaps everything is not how it is, but how it's remembered.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

I only remember the future.