paper notes in a digital world

Friday On The Commons 01-13-06

---

If you sit, sit; if you stand, stand - but don't wobble!

- Zen Proverb

---

If you must speak badly of someone, don't speak it, but write it - in the sand, at the water's edge, near the waves.

- Unknown

---

Life itself is a risk.

From Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston, M.D.:

"When in 2002, the Washington D.C. area endured three weeks of random sniper attacks, there was a virtual panic, with people altering their lives and school systems cancelling field trips and keeping children indoors. "If we can save onle life the precautions are worth it," was a common refrain. No one pointed out that the logical extension of this philosophy would be too never leave home again."

---

So Many Books, Too Little Time.

From: The Little Guide To Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen:

"It's natural to feel discouraged when we finally face the facts: there's a yawning expanse of delicious knowledge and captivating stories we are fated never to know."

---

No matter how incomplete or fitfully kept, journals honor that most human of instincts: our need to leave a trace.

- Alexandra Johnson, author of Leaving A Trace

---

We discover what works by finding out what doesn't work; those who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.

- Samuel Smiles

---

We cannot cross the sea, merely by staring at the water.

- Rabindranath Tagore

---

You don't get to choose how or when to die. You only choose how you're going to live.

- Joan Baez

---

Every exit is an entrance to somewhere else.

- Tom Stoppard

---

You can't get a cup of tea large enough, or a book long enough to suit me.

- C.S. Lewis

---

Laughter is the Sun that drives Winter from the human face.

- Victor Hugo

---

Friday On The Commons - 01-06-06

We do not write to be understood; We write in order to understand.

- C. Day-Lewis

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

- Cesare Pavese

We should all be concerned about the future because we will all have to spend the rest of our lives there.

- Charles F. Kettering

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

...The writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.

- W. Somerset Maugham from The Moon and Sixpence

I don't have a career, I have a life.

- Edward Abbey

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult the calendar.

- Robert Brault

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

The present is a point that - just passed.

- David Russell

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.

- Desiderius Erasmus

Friday On The Commons

A regular feature here at Paper Notes In A Digital World will be, "Friday On The Commons." We'll take some of the best thoughts, quotes and ponderings from various commonplace books and share them each Friday. What's a commonplace book? Here are some good descriptions. A sampling:

Commonplace books have their origin in the Renaissance as one means of coping with the information overload of that era. They helped students select, organize, classify, and remember key moral precepts. Commonplace books sanction the selection of passages made significant by personal experience and conscience. Many commonplace passages urge contentment and console the reader on the imminence of death, while also containing traces that indicate the particular character of the possessor. One book dated ca. 1670, for example, lists under "Precepts of liveing" thirty-seven short, numbered verses in couplets, seldom exceeding six lines, that turn the commandments into memorizable verse.

-- Benedict, Barbara M. Making the Modern Reader Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (1996) http://pup.princeton.edu/books/benedict/chapter_1.html

I keep a commonplace book (and have for years without knowing up until a couple of years ago that's what it was called), and it is one of my most prized possessions. Between the covers, I keep all of my favorite quotes, paragraphs from books that especially spoke to me, lines from movies or television, or sometimes simply observations overheard.  This week I selected a few that I thought could be appropriate thoughts going into the new year. Without further introduction.... 

Writer Emile Zola kept this phrase displayed on the wall of his study as a reminder to write every single day:
"Nulla Dies Sine Linea" (No days without lines.)

Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human condition. - Graham Greene

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.  - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The clock of life is wound but once.  - unknown

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known known and discovered.  - Carl Sagan

In keeping a diary, I have discovered that nothing never happens.  - Thomas Mallon

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, look it up, go to the literature. Information was control.
- Joan Didion from The Year of Magical Thinking

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience? Well, that comes from poor judgment. - unknown

In writing a novel, there is in the beginning what I call a theme. It's not an idea, but a feeling. Then this feeling goes on developing and unraveling itself like a rope. This is why I say a novel writes itself. One writes a novel in order to know why one writes it. It is the same with life - you live not for some end, but in order to know why you live.
- Alberto Moravia

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
- Soren  Kierkegaard

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.  - Colin Wilson

Happiness is as a butterfly, which, when pursued is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Today was productive: I worked on the proof of one of my poems all day. In the morning I took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. - Oscar Wilde