A Few Great Quotes (and pictures of pretty notebooks) for Your Day

I've been collecting quotes in a lovely commonplace book (from Paperblanks, pictured above on the left) for a number of years now (and collecting quotes in places all over for many years before that). I enjoy both collecting them and reading over them occasionally. The first book contains a variety of quotes, including a lot of spiritual ones.

Recently I decided to start a separate commonplace book for quotes having to do with education, people, culture, etc. (it's a pretty wide field). That's the one pictured above on the right and in the open book picture below.

I really love these beautiful books and find that the beauty itself motivates me to write in them and read through them more often.

So I've been piecing these quotes together from all over, especially in preparation for my trip to Denver this weekend (and for use with some of my talks at the Rocky Mountain Catholic Home Educator's Conference there). Thought I'd share a few of the quotes here...

Dear friends, may no adversity paralyze you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world.

- Pope Benedict XVI, Madrid, August 2011

The sacramental imagination gets the world into proper focus... G.K. Chesterton insisted that Catholicism was about thick steaks, cigars, pubs, and laughter. Catholicism is more than that, of course. but it's also that and to miss that is to miss something crucial in the Catholic world. The Catholic world isn't nervous about is legitimate pleasures. In fact, it's a world in which those pleasures can be fully enjoyed because they're understood for what they really are - anticipations of the joy that awaits us in the kingdom of God. And that, I suggest, is a lot more appealing than granola-and-Corona-Lite gnosticism.

- George Weigel

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home. - William Temple

If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. - Abigail Van Buren

Education should no longer be mostly imparting knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentials. - Maria Montessori

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. - Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

In the absence of any other proof, my thumb alone would convince me of God's existence. - Sir Isaac Newton

Children trying out new things are like plants putting out little green shoots. We must be careful not to cut them off. - John Holt

In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the creator may, as He freely wills use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power: we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass. - St. Albert the Great

With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of His own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in His creative power. - Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists

It is important for us to live Christianity and to think as Christians in such a way that it incorporates what is good and right about modernity - and at the same time separates and distinguishes itself from what is becoming a counter-religion. - Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to  let him know that you trust him. - Booker T. Washington

Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas... We must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food.  Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children

The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. – Catechism of the Catholic Church #2469

Respect all reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them. - Maria Montessori

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. - Emily Dickinson