Quotes about memories
page 8

“Memory… is an internal rumor.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

“Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sadness

“Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Nature

“Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.”

Anita Shreve book Fortune's Rocks

Source: Fortune's Rocks

Love, Imagination, Kiss, Parting

“I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Home, Thinking, Tree

“As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.”

Justin Cronin book The Twelve

Bradford J. Wolgast
The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)
Source: The Twelve

Feeling, Parting, Personality

“A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and
let go?”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Story of Us

History, Question, Time, Waiting

“Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Source: Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

Reality, Water, Time

“All memories fade away in the end. Then, only dreams are left. And because they are all we have, we confide our life’s worries to them.”

Philippe Forest (1962) French writer

Life, Dreams, Confidence

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”

James Baldwin book Going to Meet the Man

Source: Going to Meet the Man

Love, Life, People, World

“Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.”

Ally Carter Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Source: Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Learning

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Past

“For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.”

Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home

Source: Sing You Home

Love, Music

“I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost living presence.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Learning

“Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Distant, Sun, Heart, Deep

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 1 et seq.

Spring, Dead

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Part of an endorsement statement for The Dying of the Trees (1997) by Charles E. Little http://www.ecobooks.com/books/dying.htm.

Justice, Nature, Decision, Sense

“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Love, Heart, Childhood, Christmas

“Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Thinking, Nostalgia

“At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

The first two sentences of this statement first appear as attributed to France in the 1990s, but the full statement is earlier attributed to William Feather, as quoted in Telephony, Vol. 150 (1956), p. 23 http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm0jAQAAMAAJ&q=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&dq=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qYJOU9dAzoXRAYumgcAP&ved=0CMsCEOgBMDQ Misattributed

Education

“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

Sense, Loss

“I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Pain, Sadness

“And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Source: Someone Like You

Heart

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Soul

“part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you”

W.S. Merwin The Shadow of Sirius

Source: The Shadow of Sirius

Way, Learning, Parting

“Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves.”

Melissa de la Cruz book The Van Alen Legacy

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

People

“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Past, Sad, Depressing

“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

Time

“And the memories of all we have loved stay and come back to us in the evening of our life. They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them.”

Vincent Van Gogh book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Love, Life, Sleep, Dead

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

Joan Didion book Blue Nights

Source: Blue Nights

Thinking

“Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”

Chris Bohjalian (1962) American novelist

Source: Secrets of Eden

Food, Season

“Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

People, Soul, Heart

“That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

Source: Paint it Black

Forgetting

“When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

“I want the same one, the way she always is, without failures, without fights, without bad memories.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Way, Failure, Fight

“Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a hope. Today was another day to live and do one's best to love”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Into the Dreaming

Love, Hope

“For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

“Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.”

Christopher Hitchens book Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Books, Parting, Personality, Forgetting

“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday.”

Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895–1986) American novelist

Way, Time

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

God, Joy

“Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”

Sebastian Faulks book Charlotte Gray

Source: Charlotte Gray

“Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality.

-Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt”

Judith McNaught book Whitney, My Love

Source: Whitney, My Love

Dreams, Reality, Childhood

“Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

People, Forgiveness

“Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Wedding

Source: The Wedding

Time

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

Italo Calvino book Invisible Cities

Source: Invisible Cities

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Beauty

“Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

People, Truth, Idea, Thinking

“Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. Getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

“People parted, years passed, they met again- and the meeting proved no reunion, offered no warm memories, only the acid knowledge that time had passed and things weren't as bright or attractive as they had been.”

Jacqueline Susann book Valley of the Dolls

Source: Valley of the Dolls

People, Knowledge, Time, Parting

“The work of memory collapses time.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Time

“Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

Source: The Crossing

Life, Sad, Deep, Family

“I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Sun

“It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”

Celeste Ng book Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Source: Everything I Never Told You

Love, Way

“When his brain died, all of the memories
held in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporate
in a flood of chemical reactions.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Knowledge

“I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Thinking, Time

“There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

World, Peace, Forgetting

“Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

2000s, There Is No God (2005)

God, People, Time

“A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.”

Jack Kerouac book Book of Sketches

Source: Book of Sketches

Dreams

“Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.”

James Joyce book The Dead

Source: The Dead

Life, Secret, Star

“Damn right I begrudge! I grudge every memory of yours that doesna hold me, and every tear ye've shed for another, and every second you've spent in another man's bed!”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Tear

“A memory, pressed into my heart like a leaf in a book.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Books, Heart

“You have a memory chip that small implanted in you,” he verified.
I nodded, guessing this was somewhat worse than having cooties.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Rage, Envy

“I know you: You’ll come find me again, you’ll come rescue me no matter what happens. You’ll come for me, and I’ll discover you all over again. I love you. I love you without the memories. I love you right now.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Born to Endless Night

Love

“You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.”

Sandra Dallas American writer

People, Hope, Personality

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Passion

“Touch has a memory.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Soul

“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Appearance, Weather

“In this world of memories, there's no need for strangers.
-Kenshin to Kaoru”

Nobuhiro Watsuki (1970) Japanese manga artist

World

“You never know when you're making a memory”

Rickie Lee Jones (1954) American musician and songwriter

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Health, Books, Family, Music

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here

Family, Water

“Memories are forever.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

“Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.”
— Cicero”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

“I had only one desire: to leave, to walk, to die, whatever. I wanted to get away, never come back, disappear, melt away into the forest, the clouds, no longer have memories, forget, forget.”

Ágota Kristóf (1935–2011) Hungarian Swiss writer

Source: Yesterday

Forgetting

“He thought of his remembrance of Jordan, thought of how it hurt to even look at Isabelle and Clary. Without memory, they were lost. And nobody wanted someone they loved to be lost.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

Love, Hurt

“I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

“I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”

Pat Conroy book Beach Music

Source: Beach Music

Music

“When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

Source: Not A Star

Happiness, Sadness, Feeling

“I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.”

Jim Butcher book Death Masks

Source: Death Masks

Time

“[T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Source: Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Age, Art

“This is your country. These are your houses. These are your cultivated fields and gardens, and your memories lie here. You are not going to leave your country, are you, just because you live hard there or because you have been weighed down by the injustices and humiliation? It has never been typical of the Serbian and Montenegrin people to yield before obstacles and to become demoralized when facing a problem, when coming upon hard times.”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Kosovo Polje Speech (24 April 1987)

People, Lie, Problem, Time

“Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

::like a buttercup

::::upon its branching stem —

save that's green and wooden —

::I come, my sweet,

::::to sing to you.

We lived long together,

::a life filled,

::::if you will,

with flowers. So that

::I was cheered

::::when I first came to know

that there were flowers also

::in hell.

::::Today

I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers

::that we both loved,

::::even to this poor

colorless thing —

::I saw it

::::when I was a child —

little prized among the living

::but the dead see,

::::asking among themselves:

What do I remember

::that was shaped

::::as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
::with tears.
::::Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
::though too weak a wash of crimson
::::colors it
to make it wholly credible.
::There is something
::::something urgent
I have to say to you
::and you alone
::::but it must wait
while I drink in
::the joy of your approach,
::::perhaps for the last time.
And so
::with fear in my heart
::::I drag it out
and keep on talking
::for I dare not stop.”

William Carlos Williams book Journey to Love

Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Love, Life, Fear, Color

“The loss of historical memory is restored in the very place where one has lost it.”

Sebouh Chouldjian (1959) Archbishop Sebouh Chouldjian is the primate of the Diocese of Gougark of the Armenian Apostolic Church

[Chouldjian, Bishop Sebouh, w:Sebouh Chouldjian, A bishops' pilgrimage to Western Armenia, The Armenian Reporter, 2009-12-12, http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-12-12-a-bishops--pilgrimage-to-western-armenia, 2010-06-16]
Other

Loss

“…to harness and directed peaceful energy from the viewers under the mountain through a twenty foot, five pointed Texas Star Vortex which was hung between the two massive exterior columns on the balcony into the historically tarnished Dallas Dealy Plaza and book depository hoping to honor John F. Kennedy's memory.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Kaminsky, Denise, Aug 2006, "Carson Grant: Actor/Artist- A Lifetime of Art", Denise's Interviews and Media News, p. 1
Prytyskacz,Jean, "Focus on an Artist", Westside Arts Coalition Newsletter, Spring 2007, p. 5
About a walk-under suspended cellophane and plastic 3-D hologram mountain installation Harmony Mountain (100' x 100') Carson constructed inside the second floor of the old Dallas Union Train Station for the SIGGRAPH 1990 Convention, Texas

Books, Peace, Hope, Mountain

“I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema … I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Midi-Minuit Fantastique, Oct. 1968

Books, Education, Music, Way

“We comprehend… that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.
The child and the afternoon do not know you
because you have died forever.

The shoulder of the stone does not know you
nor the black silk on which you are crumbling.
Your silent memory does not know you
because you have died forever.

The autumn will come with conches,
misty grapes and clustered hills,
but no one will look into your eyes
because you have died forever.

Because you have died for ever,
like all the dead of the earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
in a heap of lifeless dogs.

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.”

Federico García Lorca Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

No te conoce el toro ni la higuera,
ni caballos ni hormigas de tu casa.
No te conoce el niño ni la tarde
porque te has muerto para siempre.No te conoce el lomo de la piedra,
ni el raso negro donde te destrozas.
No te conoce tu recuerdo mudo
porque te has muerto para siempre.El otoño vendrá con caracolas,
uva de niebla y montes agrupados,
pero nadie querrá mirar tus ojos
porque te has muerto para siempre.Porque te has muerto para siempre,
como todos los muertos de la Tierra,
como todos los muertos que se olvidan
en un montón de perros apagados.No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto.
Yo canto para luego tu perfil y tu gracia.
La madurez insigne de tu conocimiento.
Tu apetencia de muerte y el gusto de su boca.
La tristeza que tuvo tu valiente alegría.
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Death, Sadness, Dogs, Understanding

“I know that I disagree with many other UML experts, but there is no magic about UML. If you can generate code from a model, then it is programming language. And UML is not a well-designed programming language.
The most important reason is that it lacks a well-defined point of view, partly by intent and partly because of the tyranny of the OMG standardization process that tries to provide everything to everybody. It doesn't have a well-defined underlying set of assumptions about memory, storage, concurrency, or almost anything else. How can you program in such a language?
The fact is that UML and other modelling language are not meant to be executable. The point of models is that they are imprecise and ambiguous. This drove many theoreticians crazy so they tried to make UML "precise", but models are imprecise for a reason: we leave out things that have a small effect so we can concentrate on the things that have big or global effects. That's how it works in physics models: you model the big effect (such as the gravitation from the sun) and then you treat the smaller effects as perturbation to the basic model (such as the effects of the planets on each other). If you tried to solve the entire set of equations directly in full detail, you couldn't do anything.”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

James Rumbaugh in Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden eds. (2009) Masterminds of Programming. p. 339; cited in " Quote by James Rumbaugh http://www.ptidej.net/course/cse3009/winter13/resources/james" on ptidej.net. Last updated 2013-04-09 by guehene; Rumbaugh is responding to the question: "What do you think of using UML to generate implementation code?"

Sun

“Music moves us, and we know not why;
We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.
Is it the language of some other state,
Born of its memory? For what can wake
The soul's strong instinct of another world,
Like music?”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)

World, Music, Feeling, Soul

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) Emperor of Ancient Rome

No printed sources exist for this prior to 2009, and this seems to have been an attribution which arose on the internet, as indicated by web searches and rationales provided at "Marcus Aurelius and source checking" at Three Shouts on a Hilltop (14 June 2011) http://threeshoutsonahilltop.blogspot.com/2011/06/marcus-aurelius-and-source-checking.html This quote may be a paraphrase of Meditations, Book II: Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But Gods there are, undoubtedly, and they regard human affairs; and have put it wholly in our power, that we should not fall into what is truly evil Misattributed

Love, Life, God