Analect means a passage selected from someone's writings or sayings. The word comes from the Greek analekta: "things gathered up". Its best-known example is the Analects of Confucius — a book that came together over years, as his students collected what they had heard from their teacher. Analectic is the adjective formed from that word.
The name is not an accident. The work here is the same: gathering scattered sentences, putting them in order, keeping them readable.
Analectic grew out of a collection. For years, sentences read somewhere or overheard somewhere were set aside — first in notebooks, then in files, then in whatever app happened to be at hand. Such lists share a fate: they grow, and they become unusable. You remember a sentence but cannot find where you wrote it down; and when you find it, you cannot be sure who said it.
Analectic is that list, sorted out. Every sentence was tied to its source, its author arrived with a biography, all of it was translated into twelve languages and became searchable and shareable. So it did not begin as a product idea — the wish to tidy one's own clutter turned, at some point, into something that might be of use to someone else.
More than two hundred names, more than nine thousand sentences.
Not only philosophers: writers and poets, scientists and inventors, psychologists, film directors, painters and sculptors, composers, musicians, conductors, athletes and coaches, statesmen, military strategists, architects, designers, management thinkers, entrepreneurs, spiritual teachers.
Being famous is not enough to get a sentence in here; the sentence itself has to carry something.
They are gathered from open sources: published books, interviews, speeches, letters, public archives. Every quote is kept together with its source and attributed to whoever said it. What is shown is a single sentence, never a whole work.
Translations are made into twelve languages and not left as machine output. A sentence's tone slips easily from language to language — a hard line turns polite, irony flattens. That is why translations are reviewed; the aim is to carry not the words but what the sentence does.
Misattribution is the chronic ailment of this trade. Some of the lines circulating online were never said; some belong to someone else. We do what we can, but we do not claim to be faultless. If you spot a wrong attribution or a broken translation, write to contact@analectic.app and we will correct it, or remove the quote if need be. The same address is open to requests for the removal of a portrait or a quotation.
Analectic asks nothing of you. No registration, no email, no password. There is no feed to follow, no notification to miss, no profile to fill in. You open it, you read something, you close it.
What you save and the folders you create stay on your device; they are not sent to our servers. If iCloud is on, the list travels through your own account — again without passing through us.
There is a price to this, and we will say it plainly: because your saved items are not tied to an account, if you delete the app with iCloud switched off, the list does not come back.
The app greets you with a question: How are you today? I want to be calm, I'm going through something hard, my mind is scattered, I'm stuck and need to make something.
The mood here says what the quote is good for; it does not say who said it. This is a point that is often confused.
So when you say "I want to think", an athlete's sentence may come up; when you say "I need the nerve to start", a philosopher's. The same person appears under several moods — no one consists of a single state of mind, and neither do their words.
There are three separate axes behind this, and they do not blur into one another:
A single sentence can be by an architect, about "creativity", and in the "I'm stuck" mood all at once.
Analectic's iPhone app carries the same library; set the phone on your desk and it turns into a clock, with a sentence beside it that changes at a rhythm you choose.
contact@analectic.app