25 Quotes From 2025

A year's worth of guidance, humor, inspiration and wisdom.

Hi Friends,

As we’re nearing the year’s end I’m looking through my commonplace notebook at the quotes which have sustained and inspired me over the past 12 months.

A commonplace book is a catch-all notebook for jotting down wisdom collected from different sources. I found most of the quotes below while reading and researching my Five Bullets posts throughout the year:

1. “No matter where you are in life it’s fun to write down what you are doing so you can look back.”
   - Evie Riski
   
   

2. “I wake up in the morning, have coffee and write. After that I go to my easel and paint. It’s a rhythm that keeps me feeling alive. It eliminates any notion of age. You’re not old, you’re not young, you’re in the moment.”
   - Frederic Tuten
   
   

3. “A great silence is spreading over the natural world, even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.”
   - Bernie Krause
   
   

4. “The real problem with humanity…is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
   - Edwin O. Wilson
   
   

5. “We have the chance to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place or not to bother.”
   - Jane Goodall
   
   

6. “I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
   - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
   
   

7. “Fortitudene vincimus. By endurance, we conquer. ”
   - Shackleton Family Motto
   
   

8. “The whole sensation was of something colossal, of something in nature too big to grasp.”
   - Alexander Macklin
   
   

9. “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”
   - Agent Dale Cooper
   
   

10. “The world is full of wonderful craftsmen but there are very few practical dreamers.”
    - Man Ray
    
    

11. “Make as much trouble as you can. And get a lot of friends. The world is intolerable as it is. Make art about it.”
    - Dread Scott
    
    

12. “Make art, not content.”
    - Jack Conte
    
    

13. “Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.”

    - Nina Simone
    
    

14. “This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite, the first time I have everything, everything ready.”
    - Alice Coltrane quoting John Coltrane on writing A Love Supreme
    
    

15. “To love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.” 
    - The Marginalian
    
    

16. “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”

    - Rumi
    
    

17. “Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.”
    - Benjamin Franklin
    
    

18. “For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners or Easterners…The American identity is an exact and provable thing.”
    - John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
    
    

19. “When I sit down to write a book, I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose.”
    - George Orwell
    
    

20. “You’ve got more twists than a barrel of pretzels!”
    - Sweet Smell Of Success
    
    

21. “My cat moves silently, making not a single sound, like a black dragon above the clouds.”
    - Emperor Udo
    
    

22. “It is extremely difficult for me to pick a specific thing I dislike in people. I dislike everything about them, especially at eight-thirty in the morning. However, after giving it considerable thought, I have come to the conclusion that I dislike people who can play the ukulele.”
    - Joan Didion
    
    

23. “Of course losing my fingertips was devastating but, in hindsight, it created something: it made me invent a new sound and a different style of playing.”
    - Tony Iommi
    
    

24. “You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti.”
    - Massimo Vignelli
    
    

25. “Theres a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”
    - David Lynch, Catching The Big Fish
    
    

Leave a comment with your favorite quotes from 2025:

Until next time,

Keith

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