The Art of Memory Quotes

“Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”
― Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory

“the soul never thinks without a mental picture’,13 ‘the thinking faculty thinks of its forms in mental pictures’,14 ‘no one could ever learn or understand anything, if he had not the faculty of perception; even when he thinks speculatively, he must have some mental picture with which to think.’15 For”
― Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory

“In every discipline artistic theory is little avail without unremitting exercise, but especially in mnemonics, theory is almost valueless unless made good by industry, devotion, toil, and care. You can make sure that you have as many places as possible and that these conform as much as possible to the rules; in placing the images you should exercise every day.’17”
― Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory

“He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty [of memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.2”
― Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory

“Nor must we forget that Augustine conferred on memory the supreme honour of being one of the three powers of the soul, Memory, Understanding, and Will, which are the image of the Trinity in man.”
― Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory