“There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”

“All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

“A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

“We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

Joan Didion book Blue Nights

“If, even at three years old, we turn to the pleasures of memory, the less that is asserted about the felicity of childhood, the less there will be to dispute.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

“For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

“We have the power of memory. We have the memory of order, and we still have voices. When memory dies, civilization dies.”

Jack Cady (1932–2004) American writer

“To his teaching we owe it there is such a thing as Irish Nationalism and to the memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the memory of ‘98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

“A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called grammar.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal