“Our thoughts and feelings are modifications of our spiritual substance, and the soul, as a phonograph, retains them all forever, to lie tacit or to be summoned at need.”

Imagining memory as a permanent recording within the soul · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XXIX

• Faith
• Memory

“We often mistake our own sweet childhood for the old time, which, had we lived in it, we should have found almost as intolerable as our own.”

A shrewd observation on nostalgia and the idealisation of the past · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XXVI

• Childhood
• Memory
• Time

“All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.”

Imagining remembered happiness as something stored permanently within the self · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower

• Joy
• Love
• Memory