Commonplace Book · Quotes · Passages

Words That
Stayed

The digital version of my Commonplace Book — quotes and passages I return to. Add your own as you find them.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
The quote that started everything. The primary reason this site — and the four-notebook system, and the polymath project — exists.
01❝The Collection
"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
— Leonardo da Vinci
Knowledge
"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
— Pablo Picasso
Action
"The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."
— Albert Einstein
Knowledge
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
— Buckminster Fuller
Systems
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
— Marcus Aurelius
Life
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
— Leonardo da Vinci
Art
"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."
— Benjamin Franklin
Knowledge
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Systems
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
— Aristotle (via Will Durant)
Life
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
— Mark Twain
Action