Life Documentation Quotes

I think, if you put a camera in anyone's life and document it daily from the age of 21 to 27, there are going to be things that aren't always pretty.

A life worth living is a life worth recording.

Documenting one's life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit.

If life is worth living then it's worth recording.

At a very early age I started a cartoon scrapbook, actually when I was in high school. And it became, in turn, a scrapbook of my life. And there are about 2,000 volumes.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

Every man should write a brief history of his life: his parentage, his birth, his religion, when he was baptized and by whom, when ordained, what to, and by whom-give a brief sketch of all his missions and of all his official acts and the dealings of God with him. Then if he were to die and the historians wished to publish his history, they would have something to go by.

I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.

I'm not videotaping my life, but in a way I am trying to put certain things about myself on canvas.

Keeping a diary supports personal development.

To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.

Get a notebook, my young folks, a journal that will last through all time, and maybe the angels may quote from it for eternity. Begin today and write in it your goings and comings, your deepest thoughts, your achievements and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies.

I've always been steady on and off keeping diaries and journals. I try to document everything so I can remember it the older I get.

If your life's worth living, it's worth recording.

I take photos, I used to make films, I journal incessantly, and I really value the documentation of life. Because it's almost like you are making something special by wanting to make it exist in an object - on paper or even just in the computer - making these recordings, making this music.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

I always say, keep a diary and someday it'll keep you.

I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.

Some may say [journal keeping] is a great deal of trouble. But we should not call anything trouble which brings to pass good. I consider that portion of my life which has been spent in keeping journals and writing history to have been very profitably spent. - "If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.

I've been keeping tour journals since I was 17 years old.

I've kept a diary since I was 11.

Never have lives less lived been more chronicled.