Note Taking Quotes

“The more content you try to capture during a lecture or a meeting, the less you're thinking about what's being said. You burn through most of your attention parroting the source.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future

“I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.”
― Peter Rogers, Straight A at Stanford and on to Harvard

“Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second
perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.”
― Antonin Sertillanges

“Prereading is a game changer. It changed my life...Everyone is smarter when they have seen the material before. You will be too.”
― Peter Rogers MD

“The night before a biochemistry class, I read the last year's lecture notes. I look at the pictures in the book. Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a a few things to memorize. But that's no big deal. I've got the big picture, and that's all I need.

Bring it on professor, I'm ready.

That's right.

The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row.

"Nothin gets past me."

My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went from 30% to 95%.

I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school boards exam in biochemistry. Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.”
― Peter Rogers MD

“Plan in Analog — spend time in analog before jumping to digital”
― Carmine Gallo, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

“Prereading is a game changer. It changed my life. Everyone is smarter when they have seen the material before. You will be too”
― Peter Rogers, Straight A at Stanford and on to Harvard

“The night before a biochemistry class, I read the lecture notes from last year. I look at the pictures in the book. I read some of the book.

Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a few things to memorize. but that's no big deal. I've got the big picture and that's all I need.

Bring it on professor. I'm ready.


That's right.

The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row.

Nothin gets past me...

My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went up from 30% to 95%.

I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school biochemistry boards exam (USMLE 1).

Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.”
― Peter Rogers, Straight A at Stanford and on to Harvard

“Zettelkasten is German for "slip box"(Plural: Zettelkästen). In analog form, a zettel is literally a box filled with slips of paper witha note on it, as well as metadata used to organise those notes. The Zettelkasten method is a way of organising paper in a non hierarchal way. Instead of being restrictedb to keeping a note in only one place,or having to make multiple copies of the same note to put in various places,notes are organised so that you can arrive at one individual note through multiple routes, and that note can lead you to various other notes-much like today's internet, but in paper form.”
― David Kadavy, Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods, & Examples