Commonplace Book
A personal notebook of quotations, ideas, and passages — a tradition stretching from antiquity to today.
A commonplace book is a personal notebook in which the keeper records quotations, observations, passages from reading, recipes, formulas, and anything else worth preserving. The tradition is ancient — Aristotle's Topics describes the technique — and it dominated educated European life from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century.
John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books that survive. Locke wrote a method-book on how to organise them for retrieval.
The modern equivalents are obvious: highlight collections in e-readers, Notion or Obsidian vaults, screenshot folders, and quote-collection apps. The practice is the same: read attentively, save what moves you, return to it.
“A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
Keep reading the glossary
A short, sharp statement that compresses a truth or observation into a single line.
A short rule for conduct, usually stated as a general principle.
A 2,000-year-old practice of distilling ethical instruction into short, repeatable lines.
A short text written in memory of a dead person — often inscribed on a tombstone.