Quotes to inspire and reflect

Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.

Memory, the priestess, / kills the present / and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

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

Forgetfulness transforms every occurrence into a non-occurrence.

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age—strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

To be able to enjoy one’s past life is to live twice.

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive ... that the mind might perform its functions without incumbrance, and the pasLmight no longer encroach upon the present.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

Any given program wall expand to fill all available memory.

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.

We forget because we must / And not because we will.

As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre individual.

I doubt not that in due time, when the arts are brought to perfection, some means will be found to give a sound head to a man who has none at all.

The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.

It is medicine, not scenery, for which a sick man must go searching.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time.

The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.

What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.

For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

When the journey from means to end is not too long, the means themselves are enjoyed if the end is ardently desired.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

When we rejoice in our fullness, then we can part with our fruits with joy.

The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was upon me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, / And after one hour more twill be eleven; / And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; / And thereby hangs a tale.

A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak; / Who do not drink their tea, though they always said / Tea was such a comfort.

How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that’s subtraction.

Mathematicians who are only mathematicians have exact minds, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and axioms; otherwise they are inaccurate and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.