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Quotes about Memory


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149 art quotes about Memory found | Share this page of quotes about Memory on Facebook

Memory is the mother of all wisdom. (Aeschylus)

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is. (Fred Allen)

It seems like only the real good stuff comes to mind. I don't think of all the tragedies... (Gregg Allman)

We do not remember days; we remember moments. (Anonymous)

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time. (Marcus Aurelius)

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul. (Gaston Bachelard)

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory. (Sir Francis Bacon)

We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust. (Joan Baez)

How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality. (Christina Baldwin)

When you have made a good painting, don't do another like it, but remember the process, what you did, what you were thinking and feeling. (Darby Bannard)

By the time I was sixteen, I'd come to realize that the purpose of my life as an artist was to re-member what I had, by the age of five, dis-membered. And from that point on, never forget. (Che Baraka)

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary. (Maurice Baring)

Memory is the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and, the council chamber of thought. (Basile)

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. (Charles Baudelaire)

What is that unforgettable line? (Samuel Beckett)

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. (Saul Bellow)

Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo, more than a painting, may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. (John Berger)

There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film - little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail - except their smell. (Ingmar Bergman)

By having good memories on every place you just visit, you are building paradise in your own heart and your life. (Toba Beta)

recollect, v. To recall with additions something not previously known. (Ambrose Bierce)

My landscapes are non-specific, evoking a mood rather than a particular place, so that viewers are reminded of their own memories, dreams and nostalgia for locations. (Victoria Block)

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. (Edward de Bono)

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. (Alain de Botton)

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust. (Elizabeth Bowen)

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory. (David Bowie)

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. (Andre Breton)

Memory plays a huge part in composing paintings that speak of artist discovery. (Gavin Brooks)

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. (Art Buchwald)

To remember where you come from is part of where you're going. (Anthony Burgess)

Time spent in a painting is very much like going there again on vacation. And when the painting is done, I have seen every detail and nuance so thoroughly, that a glance at the completed work is sufficient for a short visit. (John Burk)

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down. (George Burns)

Dwell not on the past. Use it to illustrate a point, then leave it behind. (Eileen Caddy)

If you train yourself in memory work, you fearlessly attack and rearrange your material, for you can retain your original impression. (John F. Carlson)

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain. (Emily Carr)

Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. (Willa Cather)

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory. (Ray Charles)

There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it. (Winston Churchill)

The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

-Beach Music
I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing. (Pat Conroy)

Travel creates paintings that live on forever in our memories. (Michele Cooper)

Having studied the sea so intently for thirty nine straight summers on Monhegan Island, I find I can do them in my studio from memory. (Guy Corriero)

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. (E. Joseph Cossman)

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to pre-existing cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right. (Doug Coupland)

All detail lost when memorizing is unimportant detail. (Joseph Crawhall)

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. (Salvador Dali)

It is very well to copy what one sees; it's much better to draw what one has retained in one's memory. It is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. (Edgar Degas)

I go to work as others rush to see their mistresses, and when I leave, I take back with me to my solitude, or in the midst of the distractions that I pursue, a charming memory that does not in the least resemble the troubled pleasure of lovers. (Eugene Delacroix)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. (Charles Dickens)

Lord, keep my memory green. (Charles Dickens)

There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia. (Joan Didion)

Memory holds together past and present, gives continuity and dignity to human life... the companion... the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel. (Mark van Doren)

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. (Georges Duhamel)

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it. (Georges Duhamel)

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. (Will Durant)

One of Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. 'You don't remember your own number?' the man asked, startled. 'No,' Einstein answered. 'Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?' (Albert Einstein)

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.' (Brian Eno)

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life. (Jeffrey Eugenides)

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood. (Sam Ewing)

Memory moderates prosperity, decreases adversity, controls youth and delights old age. (Lactantius Firmianus)

Beautiful memories tell our story, and wrap themselves in ribbons of the heart. (Flavia)

- on painting Mountains and Sea after seeing the cliffs of Nova Scotia...
Though it was painted in a windowless loft, the memory of the landscape is in the painting, but it has also equal amounts of Cubism, Pollock, Kandinsky, Gorky. (Helen Frankenthaler)

I cannot remember how I did it. I just did it. (West Fraser)

Recall it as often as you wish - a happy memory never wears out. (Libbie Fudim)

I call everyone 'Darling' because I can't remember their names. (Zsa Zsa Gabor)

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own... (Paul Gauguin)

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend. (Daniel T. Gilbert)

Put it out of your mind. In no time, it will be a forgotten memory. (Samuel Goldwyn)

My recollections of Armenia open new visions for me. My art is therefore a growth art where forms, pines, shapes, memories of Armenia germinate, breathe, expand and contract, multiply and thereby create new paths for exploration. (Arshile Gorky)

Most of us have very clear memories of the self-critical internal conversation running on in our heads while we were playing poorly, and yet it often seems that we hardly remember noticing it at all while we were playing well. (Barry Green)

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. (Henry Graham Greene)

Make notes - I've lost more material than I've ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not still up there in one's brain. It's in outer space and it ain't coming back. (Judith Guest)

... memories that never ride anything but sound waves. (Henry S. Haskins)

Imaginations blossom amidst memories. One judiciously separates them – but is there really any point in that? Doesn't truth suffer when one amputates it from its context of dreams? (Jean Helion)

Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well. (Robert Henri)

If you work from memory, you are most likely to put in your real feeling. (Robert Henri)

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment. (Robert Henri)

-quoted in John Pellew Paints Watercolors...
The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten. (Robert Henri)

I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago. (James Herriot)

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model. (David Hockney)

What you don't remember isn't important. That's why you forgot it. (Kristen Innocenti)

The true art of memory is the art of attention. (Samuel Johnson)

I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow - before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows. (Wassily Kandinsky)

The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol. (Paul Kane)

Memories and dreams are intermixed in this mad universe. (Jack Kerouac)

- in the TV show American Masters, 1985...
The most valuable things in a life are a man's memories. And they are priceless. (Andre Kertesz)

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. (Barbara Kingsolver)

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. (Barbara Kingsolver)

Since every building and designed object is made of memory, every place can become a memorial for re-membering our lives and the world around us... a place to recollect the fragments of our lives into a revitalized whole. (Anthony Lawlor)

When you finish for the day, write a note reminding yourself of what you plan to do next. This helps you to remember today's great idea when you get back to work tomorrow. (Nita Leland)

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold. (John Leonard, critic)

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

I have memories of the clearest crystal mountain days imaginable, when we fortunates in the height seemed to be sky people living in light alone... (J. E. H. MacDonald)

Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory. (Harvey Mackay)

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I've created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I'm creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too. (Sally Mann)

A photo is a snap shot. A sketch is a memory trip. (Martha Markowsky)

I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory. (Yann Martel)

Working from memory frees the artist to paint only what is important for that picture. (Becky McMahon)

Moments when the original 'poet' in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations by the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking. (Marion Milner)

You can look at a painting for a whole week and then never think about it again. You can also look at a painting for a second and think about it for the rest of your life. (Joan Miro)

I carry my landscapes around with me. (Joan Mitchell)

I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion? (Dimitri Mitropoulos)

The selective memory isn't selective enough. (Blake Morrison)

Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter; it paints pictures of the past and of the day. (Grandma Moses)

Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. The multitude of mixed, novel impressions rapidly piled on one another make only a dreamy, bewildering, swirling blur, most of which is unrememberable. (John Muir)

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. (Alice Munro)

A painting becomes animated by the fact of one's physical presence, conducting energy into it. As you paint, you touch it and touch it and touch it. It becomes a memory of the energy of making the work. (Hugh O'Donnell)

When less than four years old I was standing with my nurse, Mary Ward, watching the shadows on the wall from branches of an elm behind which the moon had risen. I have never forgot those shadows and am often trying to paint them. (Samuel Palmer)

Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble. (Arabic Parable)

We do not remember days, we remember moments. (Cesare Parvese)

Genetic memory is splashed all over my canvases. (Catine E. Perkins)

-on Thomas Gainsborough...
To aid his memory, Gainsborough brought weeds, stumps, branches of trees, and various kinds of animals into his studio. He made a model landscape, and kept it on his table. A piece of rock served as a model for a mountain. (Walter J. Phillips)

-Force of Evil, 1948...
A man could spend the rest of his life trying to remember what he shouldn't have said. (Abraham Polonsky)

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought. (Alexander Pope)

Remembrance and reflection how allied! / What thin partitions sense from thought divide! (Alexander Pope)

If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. (David Rakoff)

I believe our memories have a much better idea about what is art than our eyes do, plus our memories do not recall unnecessary detail. (William F. Reese)

Let me recommend to you not to have too great dependence on your practice or memory, however strong those impressions may have been which are there deposited. They are forever wearing out, and will be at least obliterated, unless they are continually refreshed and repaired. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)

Our memories are the only paradise from which we can never be expelled. (Jean Paul Richter)

The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Live in the past, but don't remember too much. (Roger Rosenblatt)

Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by. (James Rosenquist)

Better by far you should forget and smile that you should remember and be sad. (Christina Rossetti)

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality. (Salman Rushdie)

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget. (Carl Sandburg)

I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep. (Carl Sandburg)

Discard no memory, neither good nor bad, for memory defines not only where we have been, but frequently where we are going. (Larry E. Santucci)

Remember me and smile, for it's better to forget than to remember me and cry. (Dr. Seuss)

Virtue is bold, and goodness never forgetful. (William Shakespeare)

If you hear a wise sentence or an apt phrase, commit it to your memory. (Henry Sidney)

I don't paint scenes, I paint memories. (Eric Sloan)

Draw places you have seen from memory. I used to paint things I had glimpsed through windows while riding in the elevated train. (John Sloan)

When I dig into the past, I am sifting through the fossilized remains of days and nights, of fifty years compressed into memories that I brush carefully to the surface and into the open air of consciousness. (Lynda Gaelyn Smith)

History is the ship carrying living memories into the future. (Stephen Spender)

Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there. (William Stafford)

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory. (James Stephens, author)

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December. (Italo Svevo)

Forget that I remember, / And dream that I forget. (Algernon Charles Swinburne)

As perfume doth remain / In the folds where it hath lain, / So the thought of you, remaining / Deeply folded in my brain, / Will not leave me: all things leave me: / You remain. (Arthur Symons)

If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer. (Luc Tuymans)

When I was younger, I could remember anything whether it happened or not. But I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter. (Mark Twain)

Did you know that everybody has a photographic memory? Some of us just don't have any film in there! (Author unknown)

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in. (Leonardo da Vinci)

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future. (Elie Wiesel)

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. (Oscar Wilde)

In memory everything seems to happen to music. (Tennessee Williams)

-The Glass Menagerie...
The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistc. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantely in the heart. (Tennessee Williams)