Commonplace Book For Quotes & Sayings

Although reading is a private activity, leaving little trace on the historical record, its importance has led scholars to investigate the evidence that remains. Letters and diaries sometimes yield valuable insights into the response of actual readers. Another source for the responses of early-modern readers is the commonplace book and more generally the copying practice known as 'commonplacing'. H. J. Jackson has demonstrated how scholars can use the notes made by readers who used the margins of a book to converse with the author and (as it happens) with posterity. — Leslie Howsam

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. — Gary Saul Morson

I dance with people I despise; amuse myself with men whose only talent lies in their feet, gain the disapprobation of people I honor and respect; return home at day break with my brain in a state which was never intended for it; and arise in the middle of the next day feeling infinitely more, in spirit and flesh like a Liliputian, than a woman with body and soul. Entry (when she was eighteen) in her Commonplace Book, 1868-1869. — Kate Chopin

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ... — M.F.K. Fisher

Life gets tangled and matter - especially when things start to go right. — Molly Looby

My uncle was 16, in junior high, and he heard me singing and snatched me off the stage. I thought he was happy and was going to pat me on the head and say I was good. But he took me home and told my grandmother this youngin' was at school singing the blues. — Mavis Staples

There is a commonplace book argument,
Which glibly glides from every vulgar tongue
When any dare a new light to present:
'If you are right, then everybody's wrong.'
Suppose the converse of this precedent
So often urged, so loudly and so long:
'If you are wrong, then everybody's right.'
Was ever everybody yet so quite? — George Gordon Byron

I had a Tesla. I was one of the first cats with a Tesla. But I'm telling you, I've been on the side of the road a while in that thing. — George Clooney

Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours. — Marcel Proust

That's what prison did for me, it isolated me, you know, it polished me up like a stone. — Jayson Williams

We are entwined. I drew power from the spirits and spirit workers and I returned it to them tenfold. The true source of shadowshaper magic is in that connection, community, Sierra. We are interdependent. — Daniel Jose Older

If one makes himself master of one vital book, he shall never become a commonplace man. — James Lowell

How strange it was to have the power to cause others to feel something she herself did not feel; and then catch the hint of it in their collective minds, and begin to feel it herself. — Kristin Cashore

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low. — Aldous Huxley

Mother inexhaustible and incorruptible, creatures, born the first, engendered by thyself and by thyself conceived, issue of thyself alone and seeking joy within thyself, Astarte! Oh! Perpetually fertilized, virgin and nurse of all that is, chaste and lascivious, pure and revelling, ineffable, nocturnal, sweet, breather of fire, foam of the sea! Thou who accordest grace in secret, thou who unites, thou who lovest, thou who seizes with furious desire the multiplied races of savage beasts and the couplets the sexes in the wood. Oh, irresistible Astarte! hear me, take me, possess me, oh, Moon! and thirteen times each year draw from my womb the sweet libation of my blood! — Pierre Louis

Hostility toward Iran may not be the silliest of all American foreign policies - that would probably be the continuing trade embargo of Cuba - but it is undoubtedly the most self-defeating. — Stephen Kinzer

I've long held the belief that as a leader, I can't ask of you something that I can't do myself, and I can't impose on you values that I don't live out. — Jesse Robredo

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of the soul. — W. Somerset Maugham

You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy. — Lemony Snicket

Don't anybody mention ice skating; Grandmaw is too old and frail and it wouldn't be polite. Hilda, you suggest dominoes and we'll all chime in - Grandmaw likes dominoes. We'll go skating some other time. Okay, kids?" Jubal — Robert A. Heinlein

For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read. — Lemony Snicket

Extended discourse, whether in the form of novels or expository treatises, presents the mind with a category of stimuli that can guide thinking though a long, complex, and coherent line of reasoning. Books structure ideas almost uniquely: The vocabulary and thought forms that are commonplace in book-length texts are rare in daily conversations. Books present a much wider range of vocabulary, concepts, and inferences than can be found in our daily banter with friends and family members. — Michael E. Martinez

She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years before, but a stout, over-dressed lady, one of those ladies with no age, no character, no elegance, no wit, nor any of the attributes that constitute a woman. She was merely a mother, a fat, commonplace mother, the breeder, the human brood-mare, the procreating machine made of flesh, with no interests but her children and her cookery-book. — Guy De Maupassant

In comparison with capitalism, which reconstituted man as an economic animal; in comparison with Marxism, which found man an object made up of organized matter; in comparison with catholicism, which saw him as the unwitting plaything of an imperious unseen power (the Divine Will); in comparison with dialectical materialism, which saw him as unwitting plaything of the deterministic evolution of the means of production- existentialism made man a god — Ali Shariati

In the Republican party, crazy is a constituency. — Bill Maher

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

Mary Allen has compiled a wealth of tools and resources - both inner and outer - to support you in consciously directing your untapped potential and creating a life that you love. — Debbie Ford

Let us put an end to self-inflicted wounds. Let us remember that our national unity is a most priceless asset. Let us deny our adversaries the satisfaction of using Vietnam to pit Americans against Americans. — Gerald R. Ford

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during — Steven Johnson