Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

Ashleigh Brilliant (b. 1933) is best known for his epigrammatic one-liners—wry, paradoxical “Pot-Shots” that circulated widely on postcards, posters, and in collections of his sayings from the late 20th century onward. This quip fits his characteristic mode: a compact joke that also functions as a philosophical nudge. It plays on the everyday practice of keeping mementos (photos, letters, keepsakes) and turns it into a question about memory and reality—suggesting that without tangible traces, one’s personal history can feel unreal, like a dream. The line is typically encountered as a standalone epigram rather than as part of a longer argument.

The remark humorously frames souvenirs as “evidence” that one’s past actually happened. Beneath the joke is a serious insight: memory is fragile, selective, and easily reshaped, so physical artifacts can anchor identity and continuity. The quote also hints at an existential anxiety—if experience leaves no record, it can seem to dissolve into unreality, as dreams do upon waking. Brilliant’s phrasing turns nostalgia into epistemology: keepsakes are not only sentimental objects but also props that help us persuade ourselves (and others) that our lives have been coherent and real. It gently critiques how much we rely on external validation for inner experience.