Quotes about memorial
page 15

Luigi Cornaro photo
Francis Bacon photo

“Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

No. 247
Apophthegms (1624)

Walter Benjamin photo

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Variant translation:
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
As translated by Dennis Redmond (2001)
Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Context: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Chief Seattle photo
Bernard Lewis photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Sweet Mercy! to the gates of Heaven
This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven;
The rueful conflict, the heart riven
With vain endeavour,
And memory of earth's bitter leaven
Effaced forever.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Thoughts Suggested on the Banks of the Nith, st. 10.
Memorials of a Tour in Scotland (1803)

Denis Diderot photo

“Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 338

Harper Lee photo
Glen Cook photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Steven Erikson photo

“The tiger is humbled by memories of prey.”

Final thoughts of Treach, the Tiger of Summer
Memories of Ice (2001)

Valentine Blacker photo
Damian Pettigrew photo

“While memory lasts and pulses beat,
The thought of Dido shall be sweet.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IV, p. 124

Orson Scott Card photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

"Amity Street", p. 1
The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher (1983)

Jeff Flake photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Bob Dylan photo

“With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Mr. Tambourine Man

Alain Finkielkraut photo

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Heather Langenkamp photo
Thomas Creech photo
Patrick Stump photo
Neil Diamond photo
Will Rogers photo

“We can make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Letter to Al Smith regarding the Democratic party (19 January 1929)
Other

William Allen Butler photo

“No record of her high descent
There needs, nor memory of her name;
Enough that Raphael’s colors blent
To give her features deathless fame.”

William Allen Butler (1825–1902) American lawyer

Incognita of Raphael, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 10th ed. (1919).

“Listen to me, skull!
Under your thin brittle boneplates
what black memories haunt you?
What do you want? What do you dream of? …
Is it your soul you think of,
flickering through frightful nights? …
Skull, I must have been raving mad
to smash you with my bare fist.
Scarlet blood thickens on my fingers,
plagues me to spew these rhymes, and still
my teeth want to tear you to pieces!
Like a raven I'll swallow even the sucked-out bones
to get a fresh taste of the past,
a drop from the torrent of months and years.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"Skull", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), ISBN 978-0394494722, p. 166
Original in Vietnamese https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/vietnamese/, and an English translation by Hai-Dang Phan https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/, available at Asymptote.

Thornton Wilder photo
Harbhajan Singh photo

“Interviewer: You and Australia have had quite a relationship over the years. This will be your first trip there in eight years.
Singh: There are lots of memories, and they are all quite fresh. Good and bad. I will start with the good. Winning the Perth Test was probably the key point of my Test career, even though I didn’t play that match. But in the context of the series, we fought really hard and won a match in which Australia were favourites. And of course winning the CB series by beating Australia was very satisfying. It is like winning a mini World Cup. The bad memories include the Sydney spat, of course. It should have been handled better. It should have been stopped. Whatever happened there didn’t help anyone, neither Australian cricket nor us. We (Andrew Symonds & I) should have just sat like two mature people and spoken about it and sorted it.
Interviewer: This realisation that you should stop rushing through things has come about recently?
Singh: It’s not that I have just started doing this now. I have been told by a lot of my senior bowlers, “Take your time. Don’t rush.” Maybe I was not getting the idea sometimes. That was missing in between. Sometimes I was heeding to that advice, sometimes I was not. Then you make mistakes. Then you come back to the same thing, “Ok, take your time, boss. Relax.” It’s been there, but lately it’s come to the fore more because I have become calmer.
Interviewer: When you see guys like Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan, who came into international cricket after you, retire, what kind of effect does it have on you?
Singh: That was up to them. They know what’s going on with their body and mind. They need to plan their lives. Their decision should not put anyone else under pressure. Till I’m playing with my full energy, I will continue to play. Aisa toh nahi ho sakta bhai ki ek ka raasta doosre ke liye theek hai. I am enjoying what I’m doing.”

Harbhajan Singh (1980) Indian cricketer

Interview with Indian Express http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/i-always-say-i-am-the-best-harbhajan-singh/, January 25, 2016.

Utah Phillips photo

“As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….”

Utah Phillips (1935–2008) American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet

on a CD called The Long Memory (1996)

Calvin Coolidge photo
George Horne photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“But Memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

A good Time going; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

John McCain photo
Paul Klee photo

“It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Statement of mid-1920'; as quoted in Abstract Art (1990) by Anna Moszynska, p. 100
1921 - 1930

Henry Van Dyke photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Will Eisner photo
Lorin Morgan-Richards photo

“The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

as quoted in Barry GEM "Barry GEM" http://www.barry-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=102602&headline=Book%20on%20the%20trail%20of%20%20the%20Welsh%20Americans&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2016 "Book on the trail of the Welsh Americans” (20 January 2016).

Reinhard Selten photo
Joanna MacGregor photo

“Memory is the fear, and I play most of my repertoire from memory.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Express on Sunday, 06/01/2002
Musician's life

Nelson Mandela photo

“I wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute to these Palestinian and Israeli leaders. In particular, we pay homage to the memory of Yitshak Rabin who paid the supreme sacrifice in pursuit of peace.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, The International Day Of Solidarity With The Palestinian People (1997)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Sound peculiarly appeals to memory.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Svetlana Alexievich photo
William Morris photo
Ramsay MacDonald photo
Joe Biden photo
Patrick White photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Francis Bacon photo
Pierce Brown photo
George Long photo
Rudyard Kipling photo

“That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walk down a street.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Mrs. Bathurst http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/TrafficsDiscoveries/bathurst.html (1904).
Other works

Zia Haider Rahman photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
William Grey Walter photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Steven Novella photo

“I will never be convinced by any anecdotal report, ever, especially if something extremely unlikely or unusual. Memory is not a reliable piece of data.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #122, November 20th, 2007 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/122
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Stefan Szczesny photo
Sarah McLachlan photo

“I will remember you;
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by;
Weep not for the memories.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

I Will Remember You, written by Sarah McLachlan, Séamus Egan and Dave Merenda
Song lyrics, The Brothers McMullen soundtrack (1995)

Francis Escudero photo
H. Rider Haggard photo
Simon Stevin photo
Alice Evans photo

“But he will have his memories, Lance - long after we've forgotten him.”

Alice Evans (1971) British actress

"Megarace 2" 1996.

Vyjayanthimala photo
Owain Owain photo
Elizabeth Loftus photo
Rollo May photo

“Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 220

Adele (singer) photo

“Round my hometown,
Memories are fresh.
Round my hometown,
Ooh the people I've met
Are the wonders of my world.”

Adele (singer) (1988) British singer-songwriter

Hometown Glory.
Song lyrics, 19 (2008)

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge photo

“Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?—
Moths that a garment fret.
The world is turned memorial, crying, "Thou
Shalt not forget!"”

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907) British writer

Mandragora, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Alberto Gonzales photo
Isabelle Adjani photo
Ellsworth Kelly photo
Kurt Lewin photo
Bruce Palmer Jr. photo

“Ah, we fondly cherish
Faded things
That had better perish.
Memory clings
To each leaf it saves.
Chilly winds are blowing.
It will soon be snowing
On our graves.”

John Henry Boner (1845–1903) American writer

Gather Leaves and Grasses, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Tenzin Gyatso photo
Stéphane Mallarmé photo
Daniel Webster photo

“Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: Discourse in Commemoration of Adams and Jefferson (1826), p. 146

Eugene J. Martin photo

“It’s past time that people get involved in thinking – now that the computers can take over the field of memory.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

George W. Bush photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
James A. Garfield photo