Creed
It’s not the critic who counts.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, 1910. Public domain.
This house takes its name from that passage. That is a dangerous thing to do. Names get lazy. They start doing the looking for you.
The journal is not a museum of Roosevelt, and it is not a pep talk. It is an attempt to keep the record of particular lives — in sport, in public work, in expeditions that can fail where other people can see them — and to look at those lives long enough that a motto cannot stand in for them.
Dare Greatly stays on the crest. The looking stays here.