Sermon quotes on memory
Daniel G. Amen
Memory is the fabric of our souls. It enables us to integrate and make sense of the experiences of our bodies, minds, and spirits. It makes us who we are and allows us to keep our loved ones close, even when they are far away. Memory houses our joys, our hurts, and all of life’s lessons.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.
Letters and Papers from Prison, Simon and Schuster, 2011, p.79,
Emily Dickinson
The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter—
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life—
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R.W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
George Duhamel
Sometimes you will never know the value of something, until it becomes a memory.
George Eliot
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…”
Thomas Fuller
Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.
Thomas Fuller
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.
Barbara Kingsolver
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Woodrow Kroll
Nothing cures ingratitude as quickly as a good memory.
Lessons On Living from Exodus
Milan Kundera
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
Abraham Lincoln
No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
Anita Loos
Memory is more indelible than ink.
Lois Lowry
The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
Quoted in Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way Daring Path into the Abundant Life, Zondervan.
Guy de Maupassant
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
John Newton
My memory is almost gone, but I remember two things; that I am a great sinner, and Christ is a Great Savior.
Quoted in John Pollock’s Amazing Grace: John Newton’s Story (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Gordon Olson
Everything we do proceeds from a decision of will, involves our intelligence and perception, leads to emotional reactions or experiences, is approved or disapproved by the conscience, and is registered in the memory in complete perspective.
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Marilynne Robinson
“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
Cesare Pavese
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Alma Elizabeth Murch, This Business of Living, Transaction Publishers
Alexander Pope
How vast a memory has love!
Letters of Alexander Pope Works and Arranged Expresly for the Use Young People, 1849, p.84.
James Stalker
Augustine says that we may, out of our dead sins, make stepping stones to rise to the heights of perfection. What did he mean by that? He meant that the memory of our falls may breed in us such a humility, such a distrust of self, such a constant clinging to Christ as we could never have had without the experience of our own weakness.
Chuck Swindoll
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
Mark Twain
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
Mark Twain
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
Justine Olawsky
Remember. It is probably the greatest biblical exhortation… after “love.”
Miroslav Volf
When we remember the past, it is not only the past; it breaks into the present and gains a new lease on life.
Frederick Buechner
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between the past, present, and future ultimately meaningless: to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.
Dory (Ellen DeGeneres)
“I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I don’t really remember yesterday all that well.”
Finding Dory
Marilynne Robinson
I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.
A.J. Swoboda
Remembering is a godly act — time and again retrieving the truth of God in the present. Perhaps this is why St. Paul constantly “reminds” the early churches of the gospel of Jesus — the church is the one that so easily forgets it. God’s people are indeed saved from their sins. But apparently not from a bad memory.
Sir Norman Wisdom
As you get older, three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.
Andrew Murray
Memory is one of the highest powers in our nature. By it day is linked to day, the unity of life through all our years is kept up, and we know that we are still ourselves. In the spiritual life, recollection is of infinite value. For the sanctifying of our memory, in the service of our spiritual life, God has provided most beautifully. The Holy Spirit is the remembrancer, the Spirit of recollection. Jesus said, “He shall bring all things to your remembrance.”
Still Looking for inspiration?
Consider checking out our illustrations page on Memory.