Source Your Own Daily-Quotes in Obsidian

Hey! This post has gotten a bit old and I'm no longer using the solution described here myself. I will keep the post around, but now recommend taking a look at either this plugin or this more elegant solution. Though I can't vouch for either myself, I no longer feel confident in my own solution decribed below as well.

In this post you will learn how to collect quotes in Obsidian and then use them inside your daily notes for inspiration. Either as a replacement or in addition to the quotes from https://quotes.rest/ many people already use.

Intro

If you use Obsidian there's a good chance you heard about the concept of daily notes. They are a great tool to add to your workflow and Obsidian makes it very easy to use them via its native Daily Note Plug-In. Also, if you have looked for inspiration in how other people set-up and use their daily notes, it's safe to assume you've seen at least a few that make use of Templater's tp.web.daily_quote() function to query https://quotes.rest/ for an inspirational quote to display for the day.

This is great! But in keeping with the spirit of letting your notes represent your interests and helping you remember what you learn, I thought it would be cool to collect my own quotes from the things I read, watch and listen to and then display a random one of those in each of my daily notes.

What You'll Need

If you want to replicate the whole workflow described below, you will need Obsidian itself and then:

• Enable the "Daily notes" plugin from the Core plugins
• Install the Templater Community plugin

How I Collect My Quotes

When I process some kind of media to incorporate it into my vault, I collect quotes I find interesting, beautiful or which simply describe the contents of the piece of media eloquently or succinctly.

For each of these, I create a new note with a title of the form (QUOTE) "This is the beautiful, eloquent quote I captured." (So to be clear: the quote itself goes inside the title.)

I then you'll need to put at least the tag #quote inside the body. You can additionally put whatever you want in there. But for this to work, you will need at least that tag - or another tag of your choosing you will put in all and only your quote notes - inside the note.

So, to recap: quote goes in the title, #quote (or a tag of your choosing) in the body.

Create A Script to Link to a Random Quote

Now, create a new note wherever you create your templates and put the following script in there:

<%* 
    const quoteFiles = []

    app.metadataCache.getCachedFiles().forEach(filename => { // get all filenames in the vault and iterate through all of them, calling a function for each of them
        let { tags } = app.metadataCache.getCache(filename) // get the tags in the  file w/ the given name
        tags = (tags || []).filter(t => t.tag && "#quote" === t.tag) // filter out all tags that are not "#quote"
        if (tags.length > 0 && filename.startsWith("(QUOTE)")) { // list will contain at least one tag for the relevant notes, also filter out all notes that dont start w/ "QUOTE"
            quoteFiles.push(filename.slice(0, filename.length - 3)) // cut off last three characters from filename, otherwise the links would contain `.md` at the end
        }
    })

    const randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * quoteFiles.length)

    tR += `[[${quoteFiles[randomIndex]}]]`
%>

And then put this one inside your daily note template:

<% tp.file.include("[[Random Quote]]") %>

That's it!

Here's an example from my daily note from today:

(The quote is from Jeroen Fieren's great post The Opposite Collector’s Fallacy)

Thanks

In creating this, I had help from users torantine, SkepticMystic and koala from the Obsidian Discord Server. Also, the function above is heavily based on the findTargets() function from the tag-wrangler plugin.

Also, thanks to @thedyslexicpoet for catching a bug in my original script.

Edits

2021/07/24:

Fixed a potential bug in the script by removing the ' in don't in this line:

if (tags.length > 0 && filename.startsWith("(QUOTE)")) { // list will contain at least one tag for the relevant notes, also filter out all notes that don't start w/ "QUOTE"

Turning it into this:

if (tags.length > 0 && filename.startsWith("(QUOTE)")) { // list will contain at least one tag for the relevant notes, also filter out all notes that dont start w/ "QUOTE"