Recollection Quotes - Page 7

• Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.

  Alexander Smith

  Memories, Fire, Echoes

  Alexander Smith (1863). “Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.122

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• How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality,--a place, a country, a local habitation! how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us! Here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beautified and canonized forever, with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places,--rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others,--where distress or death came once, and since then dwells forevermore.

  Washington Irving

  Summer, Country, Dark

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• At length weariness succeeds to labor, and the mind lies at ease in the contemplation of her own attainments without any desire of new conquests or excursions. This is the age of recollection and narrative; the opinions are settled, and the avenues of apprehension shut against any new intelligence; the days that are to follow must pass in the inculcation of precepts already collected, and assertion of tenets already received; nothing is henceforward so odious as opposition, so insolent as doubt, or so dangerous as novelty.

  Samuel Johnson

  Lying, Doubt, Mind

  Samuel Johnson (2003). “Selected Essays”, p.380, Penguin UK

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• I remember the day I started school; my mother's tears as I skipped away; birthdays with candles on the cake, too soon too many abandoned for the mess they made.

  Francis Norris, 1st Earl of Berkshire

  Mother, Memories, School

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• In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

  William James

  Strong, New Experiences, Years

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.625, Cosimo, Inc.

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• What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

  Federico Fellini

  Art, Memories, Style

  Federico Fellini, Damian Pettigrew (2003). “I'm a born liar: a Fellini lexicon”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• I don’t think we ever really live in the present; instead, we’re either just this side of the past or future, wavering anxiously between anticipation and recollection. That’s where I lived my life, always wanting, longing, wishing.

  Jonathan Hull

  Past, Thinking, Wish

  Jonathan Hull (2001). “Losing Julia”, Island Books

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• Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.

  John Ruskin

  Love, Children, Past

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• It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Writing, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.75, Courier Corporation

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• However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.

  Alexei Sayle

  Memories, Vivid, Facts

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• How often has providence convinced its observers, upon a sober recollection of the events of their lives, that if the Lord had left them to their own counsels they had as often been their own tormentors, if not executioners!

  John Flavel

  Christian, Events, Sober

  John Flavel (1840). “Divine Conduct: Or, The Mystery of Providence, Wherein the Being and Efficacy of Providence are Asserted and Vindicated ... and the Proper Course of Improving All Providences Pointed Out”, p.19

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• How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view.

  Samuel Woodworth

  Heart, Views, Water

  Samuel Woodworth (1831). “Melodies, duets, trios, songs, and ballads, pastoral, amatory, sentimental, patriotic, religious, and miscellaneous. Together with metrical epistles, tales and recitations”, p.12

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• We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

  Plato

  Process

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• There is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

  Miguel

  Pain, Doe, Ends

  de Cervantes, Miguel (2015). “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”, p.119, Aegitas

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• The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer

  Thomas Merton

  Art, Prayer, Leisure

  Thomas Merton, (2013). “Thomas Merton - Spiritual Direction and Meditation”, p.51, Read Books Ltd

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• My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Hero, College, Slavery

  George Edward Woodberry (1912). “Wendell Phillips: The Faith of an American”

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• The origin of the political relations between the United States and France is coeval with the first years of our independence. The memory of it is interwoven with that of our arduous struggle for national existence. Weakened as it has occasionally been since that time, it can by us never be forgotten, and we should hail with exultation the moment which should indicate a recollection equally friendly in spirit on the part of France.

  John Quincy Adams

  Memories, Struggle, Years

  John Quincy Adams, Kenneth V. Jones, United States. President (1825-1829 : Adams) (1970). “John Quincy Adams, 1767-1848; chronology, documents, bibliographical aids”, Oceana Pubns

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• Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

  Mary McCarthy

  Atheist, Eye, True Life

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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• On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.

  Norman Mailer

  Winter, Fog, Years

  Norman Mailer (2007). “Harlot's Ghost: A Novel”, p.15, Random House

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• Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!

  Washington Irving

  Death, Regret, Spring

  Washington Irving (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Washington Irving (Illustrated)”, p.136, Delphi Classics

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• One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.

  Edgar Degas

  Invention, Tyranny, Liberated

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• Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Country, Childhood, Agents

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• We must bear in recollection that the sentiment of the picture is that of solemnity, not gaiety & nothing garish, but the contrary - yet it must be bright, clear, alive fresh, and all the front seen.

  John Constable

  Bears, Alive, Solemnity

  John Constable (1966). “John Constable's Correspondence”

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• Men will love to the last, but they love what is fresh and new. A woman's love can live on the recollection of the past, and cling to what is old and ugly.

  Anthony Trollope

  Past, Men, Ugly

  Anthony Trollope (1874). “Phineas Redux”, p.210

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• Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs... have usurped a large part of the soil.

  William Cobbett

  Father, Son, Men

  Political Register, December 21, 1816.

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