Memory and Imagination
The powers of retaining and recalling the past, and of forming images of what is absent or not yet.
Works to read
- Parva Naturalia (Short Treatises on Nature) by Aristotle, c. 350-330 BC · Great Books
- Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, c. 397–400 CE · Great Books
- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, 1913 · Great Books
- The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright (illustrator); traditional rhymes, 1916
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1689 · Great Books
- Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein, 1916 · Great Books
- The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, 1922 · Great Books
- Two Lives of Charlemagne by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, c. 830 / c. 885
- Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1) by Giorgio Vasari, 1550; 2nd ed. 1568
- The St Crispin's Day Speech by William Shakespeare, 1599
- The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith, 1770
- Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
Passages
From the texts
Now to remember the future is not possible, but this is an object of opinion or expectation (and indeed there might be actually a science of expectation, like that of divination, in which some believe); nor is there memory of the present, but only sense-perception.
— Aristotle, Parva Naturalia (Short Treatises on Nature)
If I therefore with joy remember some past pain of body, it is not so wonderful.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Verified quotations
Yet he shall have a noble memory
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Imagination therefore is nothing but Decaying Sense
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Let us say that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses
— Plato, Theaetetus
the living creature is moved by intellect, imagination, purpose, wish, and appetite
— Aristotle, On the Motion and Gait of Animals
He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination
— Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: memory, remember, imagination, fancy. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.