Glasp’s note: At Glasp, we value the close personal relationships we’ve built with thinkers, creators, and doers who fuel curiosity and growth. This week, we spotlight Bobby Powers —a lifelong learner passionate about leadership development and continuous improvement. With more than a decade of experience leading teams and developing learning and development at startups, Bobby understands the transformative power of curiosity and mentorship. You might remember him from his Glasp Talk appearance, where he shared insights on leadership and personal growth, inspiring thousands. We’re honored to continue learning from Bobby and are thrilled to share his thoughtful reflections with our community.
If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.
Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.
I’ve been collecting quotes for the past decade. My database now contains thousands of witty insights from books, podcast interviews, articles, YouTube videos, etc.
Here are the best quotes I’ve found on journaling and self-reflection:
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” -Chinese proverb
“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” -Ram Dass
“Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.” -Yvonne Woon
“The biggest lie we tell ourselves is ‘I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.’” -Kevin Kelly
“I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” -Seneca
“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success.” -Richard Carlson
“Paper is more patient than people.” -Anne Frank
“I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.” -Michel de Montaigne
“One dull pencil is worth six sharp minds.” -Anonymous proverb
“If [your journal] was for sale and you were the only buyer, you’d buy a million copies because this was the most interesting book that you’ve ever read. And that’s because everything resonates with your life. This is exactly how you felt.” -Amy Tan
“Notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.” -Tiago Forte
“Self-reflection is a much kinder teacher than regret is. Prioritize yourself by making a habit of it.” -Andrena Sawyer
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” -Anaïs Nin
“As time goes by, when you look back over those entries that had seemed so ordinary, they become really interesting—to look back 15, 17, 20 years...you can’t anticipate how important it will be when you’re doing it because you’re just caught up in the moment.” -Joyce Carol Oates
“Remember what it was to be me, that is always the point.” -Joan Didion, re: her journaling
“Envy is inversely correlated with self-examination. The less you know yourself, the more you look to others to get an idea of your worth. But the more you delve into who you are, the less you seek from others, and the dissolution of envy begins.” -Lawrence Yeo
“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” -Flannery O’Connor
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” -Aristotle
“Who has dared to tell himself the truth? Who even when surrounded by crowds of toadying sycophants is not his own greatest flatterer?” -Seneca
“Our best teacher isn’t experience. It’s evaluated experience.” -John Maxwell
“Don’t become too preoccupied with what is happening around you. Pay more attention to what is going on within you.” -Mary-Frances Winters
“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.” -Kevin Kelly
“Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.” -Marilyn French
“Self-reflection is the quality that most differentiates those who evolve quickly from those who don’t. Remember: Pain + Reflection = Progress.” -Ray Dalio
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain
“I shall keep watching myself continually, and—a most useful habit—shall review each day. For this is what makes us wicked: that no one of us looks back over his own life. Our thoughts are devoted only to what we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future always depend on the past.” -Seneca
“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” -Thomas Carlyle
“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” -Peter Drucker
“Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.” -Baltasar Gracian
“It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.” -Ella Maillart
👉 Want to receive two posts per week with book recs and personal development tips? I’d be honored for you to subscribe to Leader & Learner.
More Great Quotes:
The 50 Best Quotes About Taking Action
📣 Community Updates by Glasp
🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:
Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.
✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!
🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:
Glasp users have now imported over 80,000 Kindle highlights. Bring your own library in here.
Would you like to take Glasp on the go?
With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.
Partner With Glasp
We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.
This collection is such a powerful reminder that writing is really thinking in slow motion. I especially love the idea that “evaluated experience” and daily review turn ordinary days into wisdom. It makes me want to treat my journal less like a diary of events and more like a lifelong conversation with my future self.
Thanks to Bobby for putting this together. If the selection landed for you, his newsletter Leader & Learner is linked at the end of the post and worth subscribing to.
A question I have to ask, running a highlighting company: do you actually journal, or do you mostly collect other people's words and call it reflection? I have spent years doing the second and telling myself it was the first.
I'll go first on the quote that got me. Tiago Forte's line about notetaking being time travel, sending packets of knowledge to your future self. That is the entire reason we built a daily review into Glasp. Highlights you never revisit are letters you never mailed.
Which one made you want to open a notebook?
No Substack account? Same conversation on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/glasp/