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.

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

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.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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

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

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