The Art of Making Memories Quotes

“As long as you live, keep learning how to live. And remember: one day, your life will flash before your eyes - make sure it is worth watching.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“There are important moments that make up our life's narrative. We remember the defining moments in our lives, the moments that made us who we are, the moments where we became who we hoped we could be. As a happiness researcher, I have observed that happiness is often found when three views align: who we feel we are, who we want to be and how others see us. When our loved ones see us and love us for who we really are, and when we manage to become who we know we can be, that is where we find happiness.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Our lives are not the days that have passed, but the days we will remember forever.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Special photos should get special treatment. So take active steps to preserve your photos and to protect yourself from digital amnesia. Bring your photos out of the digital universe and into real print. The act of being proactive in preserving your digital photos to make them last for decades and for the next generation might well be one more happy memory.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Despite being faulty, despite the fact that our memory is biased by peaks and ends, it is still worth something. And maybe our happiness depends not only on what we can remember but also on what we are able to forget. Too much past can be paralyzing. We want to hold on to our happy memories, but we also want to be able to let go of the past, to live in the present and plan for the future.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“I see photos as the key to a vault of memories. If the key was lost, I fear that the memories would be sealed off forever. They bear witness to how time has passed. As I see them, memories resurface, or snapshots of emotions, then a whole range of other connections start to be made. I look at the pictures and feel grateful for every time someone pressed down on the shutter.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“When choosing what to do, take into account what you are most likely to remember in ten years' time.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Happy memories can be bittersweet, but they also assure us that we are valued as people, that we have deep connections with other people and that we have led a meaningful life.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Sometimes, it isn’t what the taste is like but what that taste reminds us of that is the attraction.

Days when we are emotional might be some of our happiest days—but emotional days might also be some of our unhappiest.

Stepping out of your comfort zone can be the first step towards making more memories.

So, once in a while, when planning your day off, make sure you put the options through the Ten Years’ Time test. What will I remember in a decade?

My embarrassing moments lose some of their power if I take control of them and laugh at them.

Sharing our past with someone is an ingredient in the recipe for falling in love.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“But our attention is a currency. It is finite, a limited resource which we can allocate. We pay attention to something. Our attention is a coveted and lucrative market. And these days it seems that the most precious real estate is our eyes.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“So, what are people doing when they say they are making memories? Well, the analysis shows that the memories people post with the #makingmemories hashtag fall into roughly four categories. First, there is the #momlife-dadlife-familylife category. Kids being cute. Kids playing in the snow. Kids making a mess in the kitchen. The carved pumpkins, the Christmas trees and the trip to Disneyland. Second, there is the #SassyPOTD (Post of the Day) category. Girls’ night out. Boys’ night out. Friendships, BBFs and squad goals. Cocktails and shots and things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Third, there is the #Love category. Weddings and anniversaries. Getaways and long weekends. Couples smiling at the camera. Also known as the “look what I’ve caught” category. But the lion’s share of posts falls into the fourth category—the #Wanderlust category. The holidays. The discoveries. The adventures.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Our digital libraries are a total mess. We store photos—but we seldom see them. We get crushed under our own big data. To make matters worse, we not only suffer from this photo fatigue but also risk digital amnesia. Because, contrary to what many people think, digital records are often more difficult to preserve than traditional print records.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Through our devices and social media accounts, we store mountains of details from our lives, but we never seem to organize them.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“The trouble is, you might edit out anything that is not suitable for Instagram. The debate on curation versus authenticity is ongoing, as people often find that Instagram is one long feed of picture-perfect curated lives.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“The fact that we are outsourcing our memory to the internet makes things even more complicated. The Instagram generation are not only their own PR managers; they are also architects of their future memories. However, we also risk digital amnesia through losing our precious photographs and messages along with our phone or laptop. Studies also show that, if we think we can re-find a fact online later, we are less likely to commit it to memory in the first place.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Most of our photos these days remain in the cloud, on drives, inside apps or on social media and never make it into print. Browsing old school photo albums has been almost completely replaced by scrolling through Instagram and Facebook.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“But the photos are full of association triggers. As I see them, memories resurface, or snapshots of emotions, then a whole range of other connections start to be made.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“sometimes reveal a conflict between what’s materially valuable and what’s of purely sentimental value.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“I see photos as the key to a vault of memories. If the key was lost, I fear that the memories would be sealed off forever.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“As a happiness researcher, I have observed that happiness is often found when three views align: who we feel we are, who we want to be and how others see us. When our loved ones see us and love us for who we really are, and when we manage to become who we know we can be, that is where we find happiness.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“When we have days when we have experienced emotional events—good or bad—we may want to make sure to connect with loved ones and tell them we love them. That is something we all like to remember to do and know that we did.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“The Hedonometer tool takes a daily sample of 50 million tweets and assigns a happiness score for the day based on the language used in those tweets. To some extent, you could say it is the emotional temperature of the world (of Twitter users, at least). Data has been collected since 2009.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“A flashbulb memory is a snapshot of a moment in time when an important event took place; the term was coined by Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977. They believed that when important events happen they are stored in a vivid and detailed way so we can access the memory later on, analyze the experience and perhaps avoid similar events in the future, if the experience was dangerous.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“The phenomenon of going into a room only to forget why you went in there is known as the “doorway effect.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an “event boundary” in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” explained Gabriel Radvansky, one of the researchers behind the study, to Live Science. In other words, the idea is that the act of walking through the doorway makes the brain believe that a new scene has begun and that there is no need for memories from the old scene.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“Novelty ensures durability when it comes to memory. Several studies show that we are better at remembering the novel and the new, the extraordinary days when we did something different. One study by British researchers Gillian Cohen and Dorothy Faulkner found that 73 percent of vivid memories were either first-time experiences or unique events. Extraordinary and novel experiences are subject to greater elaborative cognitive processing, which leads to better encoding of these memories. That is the power of firsts. Extraordinary days are memorable days.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“One theory behind the reminiscence bump is that our teens and early adulthood years are our defining years, our formative years. Our identity and sense of self is developing at that time and some studies suggest that experiences that are linked to who we see ourselves as are more frequently retold in explaining who we are and are therefore remembered better later in life. Another theory is that the period involves a lot of firsts. Our first kiss, our first flat, our first job.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“You can also see the reminiscence effect in some autobiographies, where adolescence and early adulthood are described over a disproportionate number of pages. For instance, if you look at Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which is 544 pages long, the death of her mother happens on page 346, when Christie was thirty-three years old. So in the period that covers the reminiscence bump, memories fill more than ten pages per year. In contrast, Christie sums up the events of 1945 to 1965, when she was aged between fifty-five and seventy-five, in just twenty-three pages—a little over one page per year.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“How do we best preserve and retrieve happy moments from places or events where there are no souvenirs?”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

“why we remember what we remember.”
― Meik Wiking, The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments