Quotes about memorial
page 16

Kurien Kunnumpuram photo
Eliza Cook photo

“How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start
When memory plays an old tune on the heart!”

Eliza Cook (1818–1889) British writer

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

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Toby Keith photo

“Ooo there's a thin line between dreams and memories
I'll be losin' my mind 'til she comes back to me.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

Dream Walkin.
Song lyrics, Dream Walkin' (1997)

Seal (musician) photo

“Today, I give it, all to you,
On this day we recall the memories,
Of what we're goin' through”

Seal (musician) (1963) British singer-songwriter

"Wedding Day"
System (2007)

Gerald Griffin photo

“A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim;
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name.”

Gerald Griffin (1803–1840) Irish novelist, poet and playwright

A Place in thy Memory, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Ben Jonson photo

“I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

On William Shakespeare
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.”

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

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

Rasmus Lerdorf photo

“I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

@rasmus http://twitter.com/rasmus/statuses/7636370468

J. B. Bury photo
Richard Holbrooke photo

“Dayton shook the leadership elite of post-Cold War Europe. The Europeans were grateful to the United States for the leading the effort that finally ended the war in Bosnia, but some European officials were embarassed that American involvement had been necessary. Jacque Poos's 1991 assertion that Europe's "hour had dawned" lay in history's dustbin, alongside James Baker's view that we had no dog in that fight. "One cannot call it an American peace", French Foreign Minister de Charette told the press, "even if President Clinton and the Americans have tried to pull the blanket over to their side. The fact is that the Americans looked at this affair in ex-Yugoslavia from a great distance for nearly four years and basically blocked the progression of things." But de Charette also acknowledged that "Europe as such was not present, and this, it is true, was a failure of the European Union." Prime Minister Alain Juppé, after praising the Dayton agreement, could not resist adding, "Of course, it resembles like a twin the European plan we presented eighteen months ago" - when he was Foreign Minister. Agence France-Presse reported that many European diplomats were "left smarting" at Dayton. In an article clearly inspired by someone at the French Foreign Ministry, Le Figaro said that "Richard Holbrooke, the American mediator, did not leave his European collegues with good memories from the air base at Dayton." They quoted an unnamed Franch diplomat as saying, "He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin." President Chirac's national security assistant, Jean-David Levitte, called to apologize for this comment, saying it did not represent the views of his boss. I replied that such minidramas were inevitable given the pressures and frustrations we faced at Dayton and were inconsequential considering that the war was over.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 318

Bartolomé de las Casas photo
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“The best Qualification of a Prophet is to have a good Memory.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

John Kenneth Galbraith photo

“The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.”

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 184
The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! …My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords (7 April 1778), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. xv-xvi.

John Hall photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo

“Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today (2012)

Walter Savage Landor photo
Samuel Beckett photo
Henry Adams photo

“As a type for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching — Boston incarnate — the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was — as Adams admitted in his own case — restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought — saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste — revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare — standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always intelligent — Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Alan Moore photo

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life…
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns…
And somebody falls off…
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller…
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives…
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The world keeps turning.
Oh Alec—
Alec's dead."
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

Joseph Massad photo
Hjalmar Schacht photo
Otto Weininger photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Alberto Manguel photo
Daniel Levitin photo
William Golding photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Jaron Lanier photo

“If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.”

Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Ayumi Hamasaki photo

“This shifted the centre of a truly Hellenic civilization to the east, to the Aegean, the Ionian littoral of Asia Minor and to Constantinople. It also meant that modem Greeks could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.’ There is a sense in which the preceding discussion is both relevant to a sense of Greek identity, now and earlier, and irrelevant. It is relevant in so far as Greeks, now and earlier, felt that their ‘Greekness’ was a product of their descent from the ancient Greeks (or Byzantine Greeks), and that such filiations made them feel themselves to be members of one great ‘super-family’ of Greeks, shared sentiments of continuity and membership being essential to a lively sense of identity. It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 29: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

V. P. Singh photo
Jacques Derrida photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Samuel Butler photo

“The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Hamlet, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and others
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

John McCarthy photo
Noel Gallagher photo

“I took a walk with my fame down memory lane / I never did find my way back"
Feel no shame / 'coz time's no chain"”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Hey Now
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Hermann Hesse photo

“The messages of the prophets are essentially indictments of Israel for breach of covenant. They preserved some memory of the old traditions, but were not so naive as to think that the literal demands of the old law would be adequate in their own times. There is no condemnation of the stratification of society as such, rather a condemnation of the injustice and extortion which was done by the powerful. To take a specific example, the old law knew as security for a loan only the pledge (Exod. 22:26). In a simple economy, loans were evidently of an amount which would usually be adequately secured by giving to the creditor some property to hold until the loan was repaid. In case of default, the debtor's property simply reverted to the creditor. No other form of security is presupposed in the Covenant Code, and it is specifically forbidden that an Israelite be a "creditor" to one of his fellows. Already in the reign of Saul the situation had changed, Those who gathered about David as outlaws included those who had "creditors" (I Sam. 22:2), and who therefore had to flee. Under the old pledge system of security there would be no possible occasion for flight from the community in case of default. A totally different legal doctrine had come into practice whereby the person of the debtor was security for a loan. Upon default the creditor could seize him (or his family) as a slave, possibly without any legal action at all. The only alternative to slavery would have been flight. This doctrine is identical to that of Babylonian law, and no doubt of the Canaanites as well. It is in the law of the monarchy that Canaanite influence is doubtless to be posited, but it is a legal tradition in total contradiction to the customs and morality of early Israel. Amos protested violently against the way the legal doctrine was practiced, as did most of the prophets (Am. 2:6; Hos. 12:8-9; Mic. 2:1-2). The later lawcodes illustrate beautifully the way in which the early traditions, and the needs of business were brought into harmony. The older pledge system was simply inadequate for a commercial economy; and if the person of the debtor was to be protected, so also must the rights of the creditor to some security for his loan to be guaranteed. Therefore, Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code (Lv. 17-26) accept the doctrine of bodily liability, but place restrictions upon the powers of the creditor over the defaulting debtor. In the Holiness Code he is not to be treated as a slave, nor given the legal status of a slave, but rather to be as a hired laborer.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Law and Convenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1954)

John Crowley photo
Lawrence Durrell photo
Ron Paul photo

“Most often, our messing around and meddling in the affairs of other countries have unintended consequences. Sometimes just over in those countries that we mess with. We might support one faction, and it doesn't work, and it's used against us. But there's the blowback effect, that the CIA talks about, that it comes back to haunt us later on. For instance, a good example of this is what happened in 1953 when our government overthrew the Mossadegh government and we installed the Shah, in Iran. And for 25 years we had an authoritarian friend over there, and the people hated him, they finally overthrew him, and they've resented us ever since. That had a lot to do with the taking of the hostages in 1979, and for us to ignore that is to ignore history… Also we've antagonized the Iranians by supporting Saddam Hussein, encouraging him to invade Iran. Why wouldn't they be angry at us? But the on again off again thing is what bothers me the most. First we're an ally with Osama bin Laden, then he's our archenemy. Our CIA set up the madrasah schools, and paid money, to train radical Islamists, in Saudi Arabia, to fight communism… But now they've turned on us… Muslims and Arabs have long memories, Americans, unfortunately, have very short memories, and they don't remember our foreign policy that may have antagonized… The founders were absolutely right: stay out of the internal affairs of foreign nations, mind our own business, bring our troops home, and have a strong defense. I think our defense is weaker now than ever.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016
2000s, 2006-2009

Guy Gavriel Kay photo

“When power is gone the memory of power lingers.”

Part 1 “A Blade in the Soul”, Chapter 1 (p. 9)
Tigana (1990)

Sarah McLachlan photo
Anastacia photo
Alan Shepard photo
Frederick Buechner photo
Charles Stross photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Pope Julius II photo
Murasaki Shikibu photo

“Does it not move you strangely, the love-bird's cry, tonight when, like the drifting snow, memory piles up on memory?”

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 20: Asagao

Gabrielle Roy photo

“In memory of those things these words were born.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

Author note to his Collected Poems 1985.
Poetry

Norbert Wiener photo

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 157.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Derren Brown photo

“One of the techniques that I use to imitate psychic phenomena is photographic memory.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book I, Ch. 25
Attributed

George Eliot photo
Adrienne Rich photo
Max Beerbohm photo
Francis Marion Crawford photo

“Alas, time and head injuries are stealing all my memories.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Review of Women of Wonder, anthology edited by Pamela Sargent https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/by-women-about-women, 2015
2010s

Ferdinand Foch photo
Tom McCarthy (writer) photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“On the Spirit of America” http://books.google.com/books?id=w0IOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA122, Address to Daughters of the American Revoltion (11 October 1915)
1910s

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“4649. The Memory of a Benefit soon vanisheth; but the Remembrance of an Injury sticketh fast in the Heart.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Steven Erikson photo
Rick Warren photo
Thomas Beecham photo

“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.”

Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) British conductor and impresario

[Beecham admitted to Neville Cardus that he had made this up on the spur of the moment to satisfy an importunate journalist; he acknowledged that it was an oversimplification. (Neville Cardus: 'Sir Thomas Beecham, A Memoir', 1961)]

John Banville photo
James K. Morrow photo
Robert Fulghum photo
George Macartney photo
Piero Scaruffi photo
Hope Mirrlees photo
George W. Bush photo
Luís de Camões photo

“A sad event and worthy of Memory,
Who draws forth men from their (closed) sepulchres,
Befell that piteous maid, and pitiful
Who, after she was dead was (crowned) queen.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

O caso triste, e dino da memória,
Que do sepulcro os homens desenterra,
Aconteceu da mísera e mesquinha
Que depois de ser morta foi Rainha.

Stanza 118, lines 5–8 (tr. Ezra Pound); of Inês de Castro.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III

Paul Sophus Epstein photo

“To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory.”

Paul Sophus Epstein (1883–1966) Russian-American mathematician

Jesse W. M. DuMond, Paul Sophus Epstein http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=568&page=147, in Biographical Memoirs V.45, National Academy of Sciences (NAS), published by National Academies Press (1974), ISBN 0-309-02239-8, p. 140

Berthe Morisot photo
Bob Dylan photo
John Adams photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Algis Budrys photo
Tom Kean, Jr. photo
Vannevar Bush photo
Jerzy Vetulani photo
Pat Condell photo
Robert Sheckley photo