Home > Topic > the remembrance
1 " ...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. "
― Jane Austen , Persuasion
2 " Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated. "
― Wayne W. Dyer
3 " The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice. "
― Adam Smith , The Theory of Moral Sentiments
4 " If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. "
― Muriel Spark , Memento Mori
5 " If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Nature and Selected Essays
6 " Fear is caused by the uncertainty of the future. Sorrow is caused by the remembrance of the past. Try to keep your thoughts in the present, for the future we will never know and the past we may never understand. "
― Jeffrey Fry
7 " Those who believe and their hearts become calm and contented with the remembrance of Allah...know that it is the remembrance of Allah alone that brings rest to the hearts.(The Qur'an-surah ar-R'ad "
8 " Human beings do terrible things to each other and the tragic thing about it all is the way the remembrance of past hurt can rob us of our future and become the narrative of our lives. "
― Richard Holloway , On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable?
9 " The Holy Spirit Asks that you accept the idea of one mind wholeheartedly, for this is the Correction to the error called ego. The ego was the belief in private minds with private thoughts, but if mind is one the ego has no foundation on which to stand. Forgiveness reflects the oneness that shines beyond perception. Forgiveness unifies and shows the world anew. You are not going insane, you are going inward to sanity of mind. And unified perception is the gateway to the remembrance of God and Christ. "
― David Hoffmeister , Unwind Your Mind Back to God: Experiencing A Course in Miracles
10 " Abelard to Heloise – Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart – it is the best advice I can give, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily can not be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue. "
― Emily Williams , Letters to Eloise
11 " There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart. "
― Charles Dickens
12 " Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. "
― Marcel Proust
13 " There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. "
― Charles Dickens , Great Expectations
14 " The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it. "
― Charles Dickens , David Copperfield
15 " Let therefore this PURE LOVE OF CHRIST prompt thee to all that is good; let this be the motive of mortifying thy flesh with all its desires: and let the remembrance of that death which he most willingly accepted for thee, make thee willing to lay down thy life for him; and out of sincere gratitude for all his inestimable benefits, to accept the cross at his hand, and to resist sin and the world even unto blood. "
― Johann Arndt , Johann Arndt: True Christianity
16 " But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ― curious as it may sound to you ― is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. "
― Oscar Wilde , Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
17 " How many ills, how many infirmities, does man owe to his excesses, his ambition – in a word, to the indulgence of his various passions! He who should live soberly in all respects, who should never run into excesses of any kind, who should be always simple in his tastes, modest in his desires, would escape a large proportion of the tribulations of human life. It is the same with regard to spirit-life, the sufferings of which are always the consequence of the manner in which a spirit has lived upon the earth. In that life undoubtedly he will no longer suffer from gout or rheumatism; but his wrong-doing down here will cause him to experience other sufferings no less painful. We have seen that those sufferings are the result of the links which exist between a spirit and matter; that the more completely he is freed from the influence of matter – in other words, the more dematerialized he is – the fewer are the painful sensations experienced by him. It depends, therefore, on each of us to free ourselves from the influence of matter by our action in this present life. Man possesses free-will, and, consequently, the power of electing to do or not to do. Let him conquer his animal passions; let him rid himself of hatred, envy, jealousy, pride; let him throw off the yoke of selfishness; let him purify his soul by cultivating noble sentiments; let him do good; let him attach to the things of this world only the degree of importance which they deserve – and he will, even under his present corporeal envelope, have effected his purification, and achieved his deliverance from the influence of matter, which will cease for him on his quitting that envelope. For such a one the remembrance of physical sufferings endured by him in the life he has quitted has nothing painful, and produces no disagreeable impression, because they affected his body only, and left no trace in his soul. He is happy to be relieved from them; and the calmness of a good conscience exempts him from all moral suffering. "
― Allan Kardec , The Spirits' Book
18 " For, when the friendship is purely spiritual, the love of God grows with it; and the more the soul remembers it, the more it remembers the love of God, and the greater the desire it has for God; so that, as the one grows, the other grows also. For the spirit of God has this property, that it increases good by adding to it more good, inasmuch as there is likeness and conformity between them. But, when this love arises from the vice of sensuality aforementioned, it produces the contrary effects; for the more the one grows, the more the other decreases, and the remembrance of it likewise. If that sensual love grows, it will at once be observed that the soul's love of God is becoming colder, and that it is forgetting Him as it remembers that love; there comes to it, too, a certain remorse of conscience. And, on the other hand, if the love of God grows in the soul, that other love becomes cold and is forgotten; for, as the two are contrary to one another, not only does the one not aid the other, but the one which predominates quenches and confounds the other, and becomes strengthened in itself, as the philosophers say. Wherefore Our Saviour said in the Gospel: 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.' That is to say, the love which is born of sensuality ends in sensuality, and that which is of the spirit ends in the spirit of God and causes it to grow. This is the difference that exists between these two kinds of love, whereby we may know them. "
― John of the Cross , Dark Night of the Soul
19 " We live in the age of Noah (a.s.) in the sense that a flood of distraction accosts us. It is a slow and subtle drowning. For those who notice it, they engage in the remembrance of God. The rites of worship and devotion to God's remembrance (dhikr) are planks of the ark. When Noah (a.s.) started to build his ark, his people mocked him and considered him a fool. But he kept building. He knew what was coming. And we know too. "
― , Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart
20 " Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it. "
― Graham Greene , Our Man in Havana