Notes Quotes
He listens well who takes notes.
Dante Alighieri
When found, make a note of.
Charles Dickens
When your heart speaks, take good notes.
Judith Campbell
He listens to good purpose who takes note.
Dante
Sometimes the only paper will listen to you.
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
The eye is the only notebook of the true poet.
James Russell Lowell
Your head is for having ideas, not for holding them.
David Allen
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Paper is to write things down that we need to remember.
Einstein
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Notae propriae, notae optimae – Your own notes are the best notes
Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.
Louisa May Alcott
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
Jodi Picoult
You can rest from any thoughts if you put them down on paper.
Andrew Strauss
You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from making them.
Peter Rogers
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
Lee Iacocca
Get your ideas on paper and study them. Do not let them go to waste!
Les Brown
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
Anne Frank
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
Flannery O’Connor
Keep a notebook... Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.
Jack London
People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes
Chris Abani
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
Louis L’Amour
Seek not to know who said this or that, but take note of what has been said.
Thomas a Kempis
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Francis Bacon
Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.
Hilary Mantel
You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.
Einstein
I find a lot of writing happens when you’re not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.
Noah Baumbach
Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.
Julia Cameron
There’s something deeply satisfying about transforming printed text into my own handwriting—about seeing a beloved author’s sentences take shape in my own notebook.
Jillian Hess
Note-taking is important to me... [it] is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.
Teju Cole
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
I’m a dedicated sketchbook keeper—most of the time. Aside from jotting cartoon ideas, I mostly chronicle ordinary moments: a walk around the neighborhood, a weeknight spent at home.
Grant Snider
Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.
Robin Sharma
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
Will Self
I can divide my life into the disorganized forgetful mess I was before I had my first notebook, and the increasingly organizing and effective person I am still becoming since then.
Chris J Wilson
Keep a commonplace book, and put into it, not only facts and thoughts, but observations on form, and colour, and nature, and little sketches, even to the form of beautiful leaves.
Charles Kingsley
All art—symphonies, architecture, novels—it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos.
Stephen Sondheim
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colours, there are only so many flavors—it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.
Wolfgang Puck
The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.
Austin Kleon
That’s my basic creative practice: walking around outdoors, pen and notebook in hand, hoping to stumble on a moment of insight. Luckily, autumn is full of inspiration: colourful leaves, assorted birds, days of blue skies and golden light.
Grant Snider
You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from making them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.
Peter Rogers
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
Jack London
Too often, we think of notebooks as a way-station: a necessary stop en-route to the perfected, polished work of art. But what if the notebook is the work of art? What if the process of taking notes is the point?
Jillian Hess
Students who take lecture notes by hand retain and understand the information more deeply than those who take notes on computers because something beautiful and mysterious happens when we relinquish speed to the human pace of thought, physicalized on the page.
Martha McPhee
The creative process: Discover - Read a lot. Observe the world. Notice. Collect - Immediately record anything that strikes you. Generate - Build on your notes to brainstorm lots of ideas. Combine - Connect previously unconnected ideas. Refine - Edit, edit, edit. Select the best.
James Clear
Immediately after every lecture, meeting, or any significant experience, take 30 seconds — no more, no less — to write down the most important points. If you always do just this, and even if you only do this, with no other revision, you will be okay.
Robyn Scott
Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.
Antonin Sertillanges
A few notes made on the spot, even under difficult conditions, have the freshness and detail that becomes blurred when one depends on remembering hours or days later. Even though rough, such notes bring the whole scene to life for me when later I wish to work it into the manuscript.
Carson
Many people feel the need to make lists, to take notes, to collect ideas, images and thoughts. By sorting them, and recording them in a systematic way, over the course of time and over the course of our thoughts, we can connect different parts of our lives and develop certain subjects.
Dominique Loreau
I don’t have an outline. Sometimes I sit down and write out what could be called a précis, except that it goes on and on and on. It’s like a plot, but it isn’t; it’s just things I think about the people and what happens. Notes. They’re notes, I suppose, but sometimes they have continuity.
Toni Morrison
On many of the jobs I’ve held, even if someone did not know my name or position, I was commonly referred to as “that guy with the notebook”. I was constantly taking notes. It is also a nice “prop” if you want to appear “busy”. A thoughtful look, a slight chin rub, and a few notes. Working hard.
Michael A LaPlante
Should I lose all my important writing, I’d prefer being able to say it died in the flames of an unquenchable fire, or the merciless gusts of a tornado, or rapids of river water beating down the front door during a flash flood. If the writing matters at all to me, it deserves something a little better than, “I forgot to press Ctrl-S.
J D Bentley
But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.
Oliver Burkeman
Notes are ideas, not blueprints: don’t let your notes constrain you. They are starting points, not the final word. Get your ideas off the page: Find your models: You don’t need to invent a funicular system to test your ideas, but you can experiment with forms and methods. Maybe the perfect tool for modeling your ideas doesn’t exist yet. Maybe you need to invent it.
Jillian Hess
The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.
Paul Rand
I take notes like some people take drugs. There is an eight-foot stretch of shelves in my house containing nothing but full notebooks. Some would call this hypergraphia (Dostoevsky was a member of this club), but I trust the weakest pen more than the strongest memory, and note taking is - in my experience - one of the most important skills for converting excessive information into precise action and follow-up.
Tim Ferris
This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passage into another document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back to where it might fit. Of course, it never happens — but it still works.
Sönke Ahrens
Listening is a wonderful skill, but given that the average human brain tends to store a very small percentage of what, at the time, may seem like insignificant statements and ideas, those books fill in a lot of what otherwise would be blank spaces in my memory bank. Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening. Please write this down right now so you don’t forget it!
Richard Branson
So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power. Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements
Seneca
This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in?
Elisa Gabbert
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
Seneca
You are not the person you were yesterday. Tomorrow that difference and growth will continue. That’s why you must write. From mind to paper there has to be an articulation beyond the electrical impulses which continuously flit the brain. With pen and paper, you have a chance to bring order to that development, that creativity, that intelligence that comes with a human being. To neglect that ordering process is to give reign to worry, anxiety, stress; each and every one an electrical impulse which is out of control.
Nicholas Bate
I have to get it down someplace so that I can refresh my memory about certain things, not about the overall work I’m doing, but about the details which could slide by me and slip away. I don’t have an outline. Sometimes I sit down and write out what could be called a précis, except that it goes on and on and on. It’s like a plot, but it isn’t; it’s just things I think about the people and what happens. Notes. They’re notes, I suppose, but sometimes they have continuity.
Toni Morrison
But that’s not why my notebook comes with me everywhere. I take it with me because it helps me track the uncharted territory of the present moment. I’m forced to slow down and tend to the parts that evoke a whole. Sometimes they plant the seed for an idea that I might write about later on. But mostly, I relish in the quiet engagement of pen on paper, my hand working with my brain to create something concrete and real, something that can’t be deleted in an instant after it is read.
Martha McPhee
I don’t want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time – a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law – that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
Siri Hustvedt
This is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind. None of this made writing the book go faster. In some ways it was more challenging to try to figure out how to put it together in a way that kept me interested, line by line, page by page, and chapter by chapter. But it was a much friendlier approach, and I recommend it. Whatever the book’s shortcomings, it’s so much better than it would have been if I’d trudged along.
Maud Newton
How shall I describe the worrying importunity of notes! For a mere nothing – a yes, a no, - the first idler that likes fires off a little note at me. All day long I am a mark for this practice. A mere trifle, you say! By no means; it interrupts,it teases, fidgets; not to say that one has to answer! Ah yes! I too have felt the charm of writing long letters to those one loves; I know the fascination of the animated reply, when two minds give out sparks at the crossing of the blades; but there must be leisure for thi; the man who is harassed by a packet of urgent missives, will bnever be able to allow himself the exquisite pleasure of writing as inclination prompts. No, he will take notepaper of the smallest size, will write his largest hand, and tell his leading facts as curtly as he can; then stuff the sheet into the envelope. Quick, fastem stamp the envelope; then on to another, till the fatigued mind scarcely knows what it is about: - till the paralysed fingers refuse their office – till the pen grinds instead of gliding over the paper – till, like a rebellious slave, you are seized with a frantic inclination to break the instruments of your torture, and throw out of the window- inkstand, blotting book, bundle of letters...and have done with it all!
Gasparin