What is a commonplace book? It’s an ancient tradition dating back to the Greek and Roman philosophers to keep a running record of thoughts and useful information. “a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat.” This was Leonardo da Vinci’s introduction to his.
They can take many forms, the distinguishing mark of a commonplace book as opposed to diaries and journals would be that the commonplace book reflects things the owner has drawn from the outside world, instead of their own personal thoughts.
I started keeping mine in 2016, inspired by a college professor. It is a basic 5×7 Moleskine-style notebook with a red cover. Mine is primarily a personal Bartletts, where I jot down interesting thoughts pulled from things I read and hear. After four years, I have over 60 pages filled with quotes. I filled up 30 of those pages just in the first year, which suggests 2 possible explanations. The first is that I certainly read less than I did in college, but the second is that maybe I have also grown more discerning in what is worthy of being written there as well.
I decided to sit down and review the lot and copy over some of the more interesting bits here. It’s quite an eclectic assortment, as you can see below.
- Cynicism: “Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack” – Gen. George S. Patton
- Political Movements: “Perhaps the right way to judge a movement was by the persons who made it up rather than by its rationalistic perfection and by the promises it held out.” – Richard M. Weaver
- Memory: “Memorizing is far more than a means of storage. It is the first step in a process of synthesis, a process that leads to a deeper and more personal understanding of one’s reading” Nicholas Carr
- Rhetoric: “Controlled passion is the soul of eloquence” – unknown
- America: “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Architecture: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” – Winston Churchill
- Education: “An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
- Writer’s block: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
- Adversity: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.” – Adm. James Stockdale
If you are a frequent or even infrequent reader and don’t already, consider beginning a commonplace book of your own. When I sit down to read over mine, I find that each bit recalls to memory what I was most preoccupied with when I wrote it down. In that way, it serves not just as a storage bin, but also a way to track your thoughts and ideals as they develop.
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