A Quote by Walter Benjamin

The work of memory collapses time.

Walter Benjamin

Quote Topics

Memory Time Work

Quote Author

Walter Benjamin
German - Critic
July 15, 1892 - September 26, 1940

Time doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in any way. It's more subjective than real. Time doesn't exist. I believe in memory. Memory is the real inspiration. Memory creates time. Memory is pure power. Pure power and pure strength, and pure utilization of space and time (if time is something we can really ever label). But I don't believe in time itself.

Arman

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Aristotle

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Brian Greene

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

P. D. James

Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.

Joshua Foer

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

Gore Vidal

Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.

Bel Kaufman

I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.

Eric Kandel

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Sue Miller

Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle

Gregory Maguire

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

Umberto Eco

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

Gary Weiss

You're going to go to stillness. When that happens, the world collapses. There is no time, no space, no viewer, no viewing, no object in view.

Frederick Lenz

My work has made me tolerant of memory mistakes by family and friends. You don't have to call them lies. I think we could be generous and say maybe this is a false memory.