“I shall love while I have life her people, her hills, and her houses, and even the very stones of her streets.”

Expressing an enduring affection for Scotland and its people · Speech, Edinburgh, 25 June 1841

• Love
• Memory

“When your Christmas letter did not arrive according to custom, I felt as if a bit of Christmas had fallen out and there was no supplying the piece.”

A warm image for the way friendship becomes part of cherished seasonal ritual · Letter to M. de Cerjat, 3 January 1855

• Friendship
• Joy
• Memory

“But it is my consolation that the spirit of the bright faces, the quick perception, the ready response, the generous and the cheering sounds that have made this place delightful to me, will remain.”

Finding consolation in memories that outlast departure · Farewell speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time.”

A concise reflection on farewell, finality and the brevity of life · Farewell speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Memory
• Mortality
• Time

“No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within shall ever shut out this land from my vision.”

A vivid promise to preserve the memory of America after his return home · Speech, New York, 18 February 1842

• Friendship
• Memory

“For to what end is our experience of life if deprived of a fitting esthetic revelation in our faces?”

Imagining the ageing face as a meaningful record of lived experience · Pamphlet, Auto-Facial-Construction, 1919

• Beauty
• Memory
• Time

“Poetry more than any other of the arts may be carried about by a man either in his own remembering heart or else in compact and easily available printed form.”

Emphasising poetry's unusual portability through memory and the written word · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

• Art
• Memory
• Poetry

“Memory naturally rejects what has not interested and impressed it.”

Observing that memory preserves what has genuinely engaged the mind. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Memory
• Truth

“There is indeed a deep fund of poetry in this attachment of man to the earth; in the immemorial associations which we have with the labours of the fields.”

Finding poetic depth in humanity's ancient relationship with the land. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Memory
• Nature
• Poetry

“Perhaps no people has ever been stirred by a great idea till that idea was animated and made memorable by finding its right expression in rhythmical phrase.”

Linking the lasting power of ideas to memorable patterns of language. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Memory
• Poetry

“It is probable that human Memory, in all cases, follows, with more or less ability, the laws of Poetic Imagination—omitting and rearranging according to Unity.”

Linking memory with the selective and ordering work of imagination · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Memory
• Poetry

“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

“We often say in the battle of life as in the game of chess—Had I only played this, and not that!”

Comparing regret over past choices to replaying a game whose later moves would also change · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter XXIV

• Memory
• Time

“These little white clouds rise and set when the sky of childhood is blue and calm.”

Using a gentle natural image for the fleeting attachments of childhood · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter VIII

• Childhood
• Memory
• Nature

“To write one's mental history is too difficult as well as too dreadful.”

Recognising the difficulty and discomfort of complete self-examination · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Truth

“To destroy it altogether would be like consigning some part of myself to a premature grave.”

Treating written memory as a surviving portion of the self · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Mortality

“The best excuse for them is to be found in the pleasure they may afford, the luxury of again experiencing early emotions and scenes, however faintly.”

Valuing autobiography for the recovered sensation of vanished experience · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Time

“I come to the conviction that autobiographic writings may be instructive to others; not to the writers.”

Suggesting that autobiography may reveal more to readers than to its author · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Truth

“The difficulty in separating the really important from the merely apparently important has always precipitately brought my efforts to an end.”

Recognising how hard it is to judge significance in retrospect · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Truth

“The scenery of my own journey, in short—waifs and strays, the finger-posts and milestones of the time past.”

Seeing memory as a landscape marked by fragments and milestones · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Time

“I first breathed, and beheld the sunne, in that Country, to which your Lordship gives that greatest lustre, taking the Title of your Earledome from it”

Tomkins recalls his Welsh birthplace while paying an elaborate compliment to his patron · Dedication to the Earl of Pembroke, Songs of 3, 4, 5 and 6 Parts, 1622

• Fame
• Memory

“A man holds, hidden away from his memory, a vaster wealth of knowledge than he is aware of, or can draw on at pleasure.”

Reflecting on the depth of knowledge stored beyond conscious recall · Address, Democracy and Education, 1916

• Memory
• Truth

“All intercourse with him was delightful, and all my remembrance of him is happy.”

A tender recollection of a gifted friend lost young · Memoir of Digby Mackworth Dolben

• Friendship
• Memory