I started collecting quotes in 1996 as a university student at Bath. Not because it was cool or because I thought I'd build a website about it someday. I did it because I was searching for something I couldn't quite name - wisdom, maybe, or direction, or just the feeling that someone, somewhere, had figured out the answers to questions I didn't even know how to ask yet.
This was the pre-internet era, or at least the pre-Google era. You couldn't just type "inspirational quotes about life" and get a million results. If you found a quote you liked, you wrote it down. By hand. In a notebook. And if you wanted to remember it, you actually had to remember it.
The Early Days: Handwritten Wisdom
My first quote notebook was nothing special - a cheap spiral-bound thing from WHSmith. But I filled it carefully, writing out quotes I found in books I was reading for my philosophy courses, lines from novels that struck me, things professors said in passing that seemed profound. I organized nothing. Just wrote them down as I found them, one after another, creating an accidental timeline of my intellectual journey through my early twenties.
Looking back at those notebooks now - yes, I still have them - I can see what I was grappling with. Pages of quotes about purpose and meaning. Then suddenly a cluster about love and relationships (I was clearly going through something). Then career and ambition. The quotes I collected were a map of my preoccupations, my fears, my aspirations. They still are.
What I didn't realize then was that I wasn't just collecting quotes. I was collecting teachers. Every quote was a compressed lesson, a shortcut to wisdom that took someone else years or decades to learn. Mark Twain distilling life into a one-liner. Maya Angelou capturing a complex truth about human nature in a sentence. Einstein making the incomprehensible comprehensible.
From Notebooks to Website
When I started this website in the early 2000s, it was partly a digitization project - getting those handwritten quotes onto the internet - and partly an evolution. The web allowed me to organize quotes by theme, by author, to create collections that made sense. It let me share what I'd been gathering privately for years with people who were searching for the same things I had been.
The site grew slowly at first. A few hundred visitors a month. Then a few thousand. Then hundreds of thousands. People searching for quotes about dreams, about education, about grief, about hope. Every search query was someone looking for words to help them through something, to inspire them toward something, to articulate something they felt but couldn't express.
I added poems - many of my own, written over the years. I added speeches - those great moments when leaders found exactly the right words at exactly the right time. I added proverbs from different cultures, collecting wisdom that had survived centuries precisely because it was true enough, useful enough, memorable enough to pass down.
What Thirty Years Teaches You
Three decades of collecting quotes has taught me several things. First, most "wisdom" isn't. Most quotes that get shared widely are pleasant-sounding platitudes that fall apart under examination. Real wisdom has weight to it. It resists easy interpretation. It makes you think, not just nod.
Second, the best quotes work on multiple levels. "The unexamined life is not worth living" means one thing when you're twenty and something quite different when you're fifty. The quote doesn't change. You do. That's the test of genuine wisdom - it grows with you.
Third, you can't collect wisdom without being changed by it. Reading thousands of quotes about courage doesn't automatically make you brave, but it does change how you think about fear. Absorbing different perspectives on success and failure, on love and loss, on meaning and purpose - it rewires something in your brain. You start seeing patterns. You start understanding that most human struggles are ancient and universal, and that brings an odd kind of comfort.
The Digital Age of Quotes
The internet has democratized access to wisdom in ways I couldn't have imagined in 1996. But it's also created an ocean of misattribution, fake quotes, and shallow sentiment masquerading as insight. You can find a "quote" from Einstein, Gandhi, or Mark Twain to support literally any position, most of which they never actually said.
This makes the work of careful collection more important, not less. Verification matters. Context matters. Knowing the difference between what Churchill actually said and what someone wished he'd said matters. It's why I've tried to keep this site relatively clean - not chasing viral quote-porn, but maintaining collections that actually mean something.
Why I Still Collect
I'm in my fifties now. I've built companies, failed at ventures, had successes and setbacks. I've experienced most of the major life events that quotes try to capture - love, loss, triumph, defeat, confusion, clarity. You'd think I'd need quotes less. That I'd have developed my own wisdom by now.
But I find I need them more. Not as answers - I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to have those - but as companions. As reminders. As perspective when I'm too close to a problem to see it clearly. Reading Marcus Aurelius when I'm frustrated with things I can't control. Reading Mary Oliver when I need to remember what matters. Reading Twain when I'm taking myself too seriously.
The collection continues. Not in notebooks anymore, though I still keep one for quotes I encounter in physical books. Mostly digitally now, an ever-growing repository that I return to when I'm stuck, or scared, or searching for the right words to explain something to my team, or just need to remember that smarter people than me have grappled with these same questions and found something worth saying about them.
What Quotes Teach Us About Wisdom
Here's what thirty years of collecting has taught me about wisdom itself: It's not about having answers. It's about having better questions. It's not about being certain. It's about being thoughtful. It's not about knowing everything. It's about recognizing patterns across time and culture and human experience.
The quotes I collected at twenty don't all resonate at fifty. Some that seemed profound then seem shallow now. But some have only deepened, revealing new layers I couldn't see before. And new quotes grab me now that I would have skipped past decades ago. The collection evolves because I evolve. That's the point.
Will I still be collecting quotes at eighty? Almost certainly. Will this website still exist? I hope so. The internet is ephemeral, but certain kinds of content have staying power. Genuine collections, carefully curated, actually helpful - those tend to persist. Not because they're optimized for search engines or monetized perfectly, but because people find them useful. Because they meet people in their searches and give them something worth finding.
That's all I've ever tried to do with this collection. Not to be comprehensive - that's impossible. Not to be authoritative - I'm just one person with one perspective. But to share what I've found valuable, what has helped me think more clearly or feel less alone or act more courageously. If it does that for someone else, then these thirty years have been worth it.
And I'll keep collecting. Not because I've figured it all out - I haven't - but because the search itself is worthwhile. Because wisdom is cumulative and collaborative and endless. Because some nineteen-year-old somewhere is probably starting their own quote collection right now, and in thirty years they'll have found things I missed. That's how it should work. That's how wisdom propagates - person to person, generation to generation, one carefully preserved insight at a time.