‘A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable and should be secured, because they seldom return.’
— Francis Bacon
‘There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.’
— Josh Billings
‘The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I’m left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can’t quite remember.’
— George Carlin
‘Never memorize what you can look up in books.’
— Albert Einstein
‘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.’
— Anatole France
‘A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.’
— Sigmund Freud
‘And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.’
— Heraclitus
‘It is curiosity, initiative, originality, and the ruthless application of honesty that count in research–much more than feats of logic and memory alone.’
— Julian Huxley
‘We can invent only with memory.’
— Alphonse Karr
‘Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
— George Santayana
‘Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.’
— Richard Whately
William Dare 