Motivational Quotes

Quotations

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

- Andre Malraux

Best Quotes about Quotations

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Benjamin Disraeli

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

Cross, Amanda

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Sir Winston Churchill

In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

Selden, John

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

Pierre Bayle

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

H. L. Mencken

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.

Edward Young

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

David H. Comins

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

10.

The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?

Smyth, Dame Ethel

11.

I must claim the quoter's privilege of giving only as much of the text as will suit my purpose, said Tan-Chun. If I told you how it went on, I should end up by contradicting myself!

Cao Xueqin

12.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

13.

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.

Robert Chapman

14.

Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.

Davies, Robertson

15.

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book -- it is a plaything.

Peacock, Thomas Love

16.

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

Waugh, Evelyn

17.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

18.

A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.

Robert M. Hamilton

19.

Quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara... are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.

Alinsky, Saul

20.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Mark Twain

21.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

William Feather

22.

Next to being witty yourself, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

Benjamin, Walter

24.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Baldwin, James

25.

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come.

Gates, W. I. E.

26.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Ambrose Bierce

27.

When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, and opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking for women's names.

Elaine Gill

31.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

Andre Malraux

32.

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

Malcolm, Janet

33.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Orson Welles

34.

There are two kinds of marriages -- where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.

Odets, Clifford

35.

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.

Dan Quayle

36.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Samuel Johnson

37.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Samuel Johnson

38.

A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

Brendan Francis

39.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

Robert Benchley

40.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

Philip G. Hamerton

41.

The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.

Morely, John

42.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

Sontag, Susan

43.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.

Woolf, Virginia

44.

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

Edwin P. Whipple

45.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

46.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

Fadiman, Clifton

47.

Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.

Hassan, Ihab

48.

A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.

Talmud, The

49.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

I never have found the perfect quote. At best I have been able to find a string of quotations which merely circle the ineffable idea I seek to express.

Caldwell O'Keefe