Samuel Johnson Memories Quotations

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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.

Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

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 encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into the short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation.

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.