If I've really learned my Charlotte Mason lessons...

1.  I will not forsake the earnest and devout study of the Bible, the one way of approach to the knowledge of God....It is probably that even our lame efforts at reading with understanding are more profitable than the best instruction.  (Ourselves Book II, page 82-84)

2.  I will pray to be delivered from prejudices and prepossessions, and wait upon God as the thirsty earth waits for rain.  (page 84)

3.  Through observation of nature I will "learn to distinguish between small matters and great, to see that we ourselves are not of very great importance, that the world is wide, that things are sweet, that people are sweet, too; that indeed, we are compassed about by an atmosphere of sweetness, airs of heaven coming from our God."  (page 98)

4.  I will give daily and hourly thanks and praise to the Maker and designer of the beauty, glory, and fitness above our heads and about our feet and surrounding us on every side.  (page 100)

5.  I will "carry on the patient investigation of some one order of natural objects....the attitude of mind we get in our own little bit of work helps us to the understanding of what is being done elsewhere, and we no longer conduct ourselves in this world of wonders like a gaping rustic at a fair." (page 101)

6.  I will "record what I myself have seen, correcting my records as I learn to be more accurate, and being very chary of conclusions."  (page 101)

7.  I will "approach Art with the modest intention to pay a debt that we owe in learning to appreciate.  So shall we escape the irritating ways of the connoisseur!" (page 103)

8.  I will "lay myself out for instruction, read, inquire, think, look about for a way of acting...[to] find the particular piece of brotherly work appointed for me to do." (page 105)

9. I must "get a wide care and knowledge concerning the needs of men."  (page 105)

10.I will "take stock, not of what is peculiar to us as individuals, but what is proper to each of us as human beings..."  (page 108)

11.  I will not "put this sort of knowledge away as too troublesome and as making me too responsible.  I have simply to know in the first place; I am not bound to be labouring all the time to feed imagination, exercise reason, instruct conscience, and the rest...We are so mercifully made that the ordering of ourselves becomes unconscious to those of us who take it as a duty; it is the casual people who land in bogs or are brought up against stone walls."  (page 108)