Keeping A Journal Quotes

• Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

  Stephen Covey

  Powerful, Writing, Way

  Stephen R. Covey (2015). “The Stephen R. Covey Interactive Reader - 4 Books in 1: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, First Things First, and the Best of the Most Renowned Leadership Teacher of our Time”, p.422, Mango Media Inc.

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• 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

  Writing, Thoughtful, Goal

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• Keeping a journal will change your life in ways that you'd never imagine.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Way, Changing Your Life, Imagine

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• In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

  Susan Sontag

  Persons, Journal, Journaling

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.322, Macmillan

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• Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Writing, Meditation, Mind

  "Author Natalie Goldberg on the Zen of Living, Writing and Eating". Interview with Jean Fain, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 4, 2013.

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• Keeping a journal of what's going on in your life is a good way to help you distill what's important and what's not.

  Martina Navratilova

  Important, Way, Helping

  Martina Navratilova (2007). “Shape Your Self: My 6-Step Diet and Fitness Plan to Achieve the Best Shape of Your Life”, p.21, Rodale

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• People who keep journals have life twice

  Jessamyn West

  Motivational, People, Journal Writing

  Jessamyn West (1957). “To see the dream”

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• Keeping a [journal] need not be a major chore-just a few minutes of notes each day can be valuable. Writing crystallizes insights, fools the defense of forgetfulness, and builds a collection of ideas and reflections that can spur further insights even years later.

  Roger N. Walsh

  Inspirational, Writing, Reflection

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• Keeping a journal is like taking good care of one’s heart.

  Ted Kooser

  Heart, Care, Journal

  Ted Kooser (2014). “The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book”, p.7, U of Nebraska Press

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• Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

  Joan Didion

  Notebook, Lonely, Children

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

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• Keeping a journal implies hope.

  Erica Jong

  Journal

  Erica Jong (1995). “How to Save Your Own Life”, N A L Trade

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• This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

  Anais Nin

  Addiction, Drug, Vices

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• I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

  May Sarton

  Beautiful, Diaries, Half

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• Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

  Pablo Picasso

  Life, Art, Expression

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• I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Diaries, Kind

  "The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915-1919".

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• I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3, 1996,' I'll say to someone.

  David Sedaris

  Morning, Writing, Winning

  "Ask the Author Live: David Sedaris". Interview, www.newyorker.com. August 14, 2009.

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• It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

  Jane Austen

  Writing, Practice, Style

  Jane Austen (2012). “Northanger Abbey”, p.12, Courier Corporation

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• Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

  Susan Sontag

  Independent, Dumb, Secret

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• If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.

  Wilford Woodruff

  Children, Reading, Writing

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• Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

  Thomas Merton

  Thinking, Discovery, Years

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Sign of Jonas”, p.216, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Grief, Sadness

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.7, Faber & Faber

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• I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Writing, Long, Mind

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• I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

  Anthony Doerr

  Fun, School, Maturity

  "Off the Page" with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. October 14, 2004.

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• Some may say [journal keeping] is a great deal of trouble. But we should not call anything trouble which brings to pass good. I consider that portion of my life which has been spent in keeping journals and writing history to have been very profitably spent. - "If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.

  Wilford Woodruff

  Children, Reading, Writing

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• I've never been one for keeping a journal, so my songs were my journals. They allowed me to express my feelings and let people know what was going on with me. I knew that somebody would relate.

  Janet Jackson

  Song, People, Feelings

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