Keeping a journal has become a daily practise for me, but while I follow the same template every day, it isn’t a static process. Over time I have started capturing things that strike me, inspirational quotes, passages out of books that I am reading that I would like to remember.
My journal contains quotes of Gandhi, Brene Brown, and even Dr Seuss.
I may never look back at these journals, or maybe I will in a period where I want to remember how it was in this time, but capturing these quotes makes me feel like I am reading the books more deeply. That I am thinking about things that inspire me. Sometimes I refer to these quotes in my “Thoughts for the day”, other times I just capture them, think about them, and move on.
Here are a couple of my recent favorites to get you started:
“How much better to know that we have dared to live our dreams than to live our lives in a lethargy of regret” Gilbert E Kaplan
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt