A commonplace is a traditional self-education tool: as you read, grab a notebook. Write down things that embody Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Write down notable quotes, with or without your own thoughts about them. Write down the questions you have as a result of the text you are reading. You will find the book becomes a record of your own growth, and it becomes a touchstone for memory of things you have studied in the past. These are a selection of the passages that I've included in my commonplace book this month:
Passion does not arrive on a videotape or on a CD; passion is personal. Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.
-Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv, 158
We mothers have a lot of details to manage, a lot of responsibilities on our plates, whether or not we homeschool. ...After all, in the end --and even in the middle-- life isn't really about getting it done. It's about serving, loving, and caring for others. We want to do so faithfully, day in and day out.
-Mystie Winckler, Simplified Organization
How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man! And by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about as differing circumstances present? Today we love what tomorrow we hate; today we seek what tomorrow we shun; today we desire what tomorrow we fear; nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of... Such is the uneven state of human life. And it afforded me a great many curious speculations afterward, when I had a little recovered from my first surprise; I considered that this was the station of life the infinitely wise and good providence of God had determined for me; that as I could not foresee what the ends of Divine wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute His sovereignty, who, as I was His creature, had an undoubted right by creation to govern and dispose of me absolutely as He thought fit; and who, as I was a creature who had offended Him, had likewise a judicial right to condemn me to what punishment He thought fit; and it was my part to submit to bear His indignation, because I had sinned against Him.
-Robinson Crusoe, 245-246
But it's never too late to be wise...
-Robinson Crusoe, 275
It was characteristic of all his family, Wilbur said, to be able to see the weak points of anything. This was not always a "desirable quality," he added, "as it makes us too conservative for successful businessmen, and limits our friendships to a very limited circle."
-The Wright Brothers, David McCullough, 79
Their nephew Milton, who as a boy was often hanging about the [Wright] brothers, would one day write, "History was being made in their bicycle shop and in their home, but the making was so obscured by the commonplace that I did not recognize it until many years later."
-The Wright Brothers, David McCullough, 113
The best dividends on labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.
-Orville and Wilbur Wright, quoted in The Wright Brothers, David McCullough, 125
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