One of my favorite “books” among the 12 that form MoneyLove 3.0 is QuoteLove, as it contains one of my proudest inventions: the Quotercise. These are exercises and games designed to make more of the quotes we choose as favorites, or any quote we come across. I’m still amazed that I came up with 100 of these quote-related awareness exercises for QuoteLove.
Since the Moneylove Team will begin this week sending out the free weekly motivational and inspirational quotes, along with an accompanying Quotercise to anyone signing up for this new feature, I wanted to share one of these exercises that I’ve been using a lot. It’s number 37 in the list of 100 in the book, and, as with all my exercises, can easily be modified or added to for even more positive experiences.
For many years, one of my favorite quotes has been by writer Christopher Morley:
Tip: Find a quote you like written by someone you have never seen another quote by, and Google their name with ‘quotes’ following it, and find another one of their quotes you really like.
I only looked up other quotes by Morley when I created the Quotercises concept last year, and one of those I really like:
You might agree with my assertion that doing what Morley suggests could dramatically and emphatically change your life if you put it into practice.
To further expand the original Quotercise, I looked up a number of books by Morley on Amazon and found that many were free Kindle downloads, as they were written in the early part of the 20th Century. One of these books was a collection of essays, which I am now reading.Modern Essays was published in 1921 and I love Christopher Morley’s perception of a reader of this collection of 33 American and English essays, “a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.”
One of the essays is titled, The Almost Perfect State, by poet, essayist, and columnist Don Marquis. His name was familiar to me, as I was a fan as a 12-year-old of his most famous work, Archy and Mehitabel. Archy is described as a cockroach with the soul of a poet, while Mehitabel is a cat who claims to have been Cleopatra in a former life. As I practiced typing on my used Underwood typewriter, I identified with Archy, who every night would struggle with the keys of Don Marquis’s typewriter to turn out poetry and commentary. All of Archy’s writings were without punctuation and in lowercase, as you can imagine the difficulty a cockroach would face trying to hold down a letter and the Shift key simultaneously.I plan to go back and reread Archy and Mehitabel, and am sure I will find some juicy quotes to add to my collection. For now, I want to share the following Don Marquis quote from his essay:
The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it.
I liked that quote so much, I immediately Googled Don Marquis Quotes, to see if I could find some more gems, and discovered many, including this one:
As I continued my synergistic quote adventure I came across this website that I have just put into my back burner file for future perusing.
http://donmarquis.com/archy-and-mehitabel
So, can you think of a favorite quote of yours by a writer whose other quotes you’ve never explored? And remember, just because a quote may be the most popular one from a particular author doesn’t mean it’s his or her best, or the one you will be most inspired by.
Jerry
