If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them – neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God, who assisted him, shall be with me and aid me, I must fail; but if the same omniscient mind and almighty arm that directed and protected him shall guide and support me, I shall not fail – I shall succeed.

I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.

I never know what day it is. Never, ever, ever.

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

To rule is easy, to govern difficult.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

I only see clearly what I remember.

I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.

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

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.

My recollection is – and I’d have to confirm this – but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.