Why I Keep a Commonplace Book (and Always Will)

I started a thinking session in Ember with a question: why keep a commonplace book at all. What’s the point?

For me, it comes back to that Emerson line:

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now, let me be careful here. I’m not making my own Bible in the sense of replacing the Bible. Nothing replaces the Word of God for a believer. But Emerson is pointing at something true about the weight a book can carry in a life. A commonplace book holds that kind of significance for someone who thinks deeply, who reflects often, who wants a record of the sentences that have moved them — and sometimes a sentence that has changed the direction of their life entirely.

I keep a commonplace book because there is no other place in the world I can go that resonates so completely with my mind, my heart, and my soul. This book holds words that have rung and rattled around in my brain. Sentences that made me think. Sentences that gave me words when I didn’t have any of my own.

Think about how important a single book can be to a life. Scripture says death and life are in the power of the tongue — words can kill and destroy. So why not make your own book of sentences that do the opposite? A book of sentences that completely give you life.

Here’s the second reason: a commonplace book is a whetstone.

It’s the act of gathering words from others — a Bible verse, something my wife said, something my kids said, a line from a friend, a sentence from a fictional story that just grabbed me — and holding them all in one place. Iron sharpening iron, one sentence at a time.

And here’s a confession that might sound strange to the productivity crowd: I don’t really care about tags. I don’t care about sorting sentences into tidy topical folders. The only order I want is the order they arrived — the order of when each line found me.

I actually love seeing them all at once. I love shuffling through my commonplace book, one entry at a time. I can see that I saved this one yesterday, that one three weeks ago, another six months back. And sometimes, shuffling through, I get to step back into the moment. I can remember exactly when that line revealed itself to me.

Jack London understood the urgency of this:

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory. — Jack London

Cheap paper outlasts gray matter. The notebook remembers what the mind lets go.

The deepest reason I keep a commonplace book is this: I think it’s one of the best ways to deepen your thinking, period.

A commonplace book is filled with small things — a sentence or two, maybe three or four at most. Occasionally a paragraph. Little collections of ideas that have moved you. And that smallness is the feature, not the bug. It lets you think with one idea at a time.

If you want to think more deeply about your life, your direction, your goals — fill in the blank — a commonplace book hands you the raw material automatically. And because it holds quotes from every domain of your life, it’s a thinking companion that knows your whole life, not just one corner of it.

This is what I’ve built Ember around. In Ember, you don’t just save ideas to your commonplace book — you think with them. You start thinking sessions, and you watch the same quote resurface in completely different rooms of your life. One session you’re thinking about parenting. Another session you’re working through a problem at your job. And the same line shows up in both, doing new work each time.

Ember uses AI, but in a way I’d call tasteful. It doesn’t write for you. It gives you space to think, and it offers inspiration at the moment you need it — a question, another quote from your own commonplace book, or a pattern it noticed across your past thinking sessions. Your own thoughts, reflected back across time.

That’s the point of a commonplace book, really. It’s not a collection. It’s a companion. A book of trumpet blasts, gathered one sentence at a time, waiting to sound again exactly when you need them.

Need a place to think and make your own commonplace book? Try Ember.

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