Retrospective Memory Quotes & Sayings

To act well in this world, one must sacrifice all personal desires. The people who become missionaries of religious thought have no other Fatherland than this thought. Man is not on Earth merely to be happy, nor even simply to be honest. He is here to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility, and to surmount the vulgarity of nearly every individual. — Ernest Renan

Being a parent is a selfless adventure. The worldview of "Take care of yourself first" is no longer logical to a sane person if your baby wakes up hungry in the middle of the night. — Jim Gaffigan

For me, in the third book, when Peeta gets brainwashed by the Capitol, that's going to be fun to play. The rest of the time he's very much into Katniss, and for that to get turned around and to play it the other way, that's going to be very exciting. — Josh Hutcherson

Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine. — Lauren Groff

I'm an alcoholic who doesn't (and doesn't want to) drink anymore so I exist in a state of never-ending micro-addictions that reveal themselves in the form of obsessions. I was the same as a child. These obsessions are things I want, want to do, or want to be. I become so fixated I neglect every other aspect of my life. What results is that I get really good at doing a lot of different things but no matter what I do, it's never the thing that gives me the feeling, this is what I've been searching for, I am home. In other words, I never feel thin. One hundred percent of the time. It — Augusten Burroughs

This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it ... — Tennessee Williams

The flipside is that when we're not counting our blessings, we can fall into the trap of unintentionally counting negative things. — Rhonda Byrne

If you are unmotivated to succeed, no one can help you.
If you are determined to succeed, no one can stop you. — Matshona Dhliwayo

How many words grace the pages of this book!
They are supposed to bestir memory. As if words could remember!
For words are miserable mountain climbers and miserable miners of meaning. They do not retrieve the hidden treasures from the heights or dredge them from the depths!
But there is a living commemoration that softly strokes everything worthy of remembering with its caress. And when a red-hot flame leaps forth, poignant and piercing, from such retrospective ash, and you fix your gaze upon it, as if gripped by its magic spell, then...
But how with a shaky hand and coarse writing instrument can one possibly inscribe oneself in such pure remembrance, other than to stain these white unassuming pages? — Franz Kafka

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another. — Ivan Illich

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot strap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel up climb. — Betty Smith

When the Jews wanted to make something emphatic, instead of adding an exclamation point or using italics, they would simply repeat it. — R.C. Sproul

The way that things happen in Egypt, the government - or the head of the government - don't get personally involved. They were always goonies and agents and people who do that kind of work for the government either by direct instructions or because they think that they're doing something good or they want to be on the good side of the government. — Bassem Youssef

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait. — Vladimir Nabokov

She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way. — Glen Duncan