Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Brendan Francis

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our white mythology. Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.

Hassan, Ihab

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Seneca

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Talmud, The

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

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

Orson Welles

10.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

11.

What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?

Doctor Who

12.

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

Morely, John

13.

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

14.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

Marlene Dietrich

15.

To be amused by what you read--that is the great spring of happy quotations.

C. E. Montague

16.

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

Malcolm, Janet

17.

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.

Hesketh Pearson

18.

He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

Rudyard Kipling

19.

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

David H. Comins

20.

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

Benjamin, Walter

21.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

22.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

23.

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

Baldwin, James

24.

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

25.

I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

Burns, Robert

26.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde

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.

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied,'Verify your quotations.'

Sir Winston Churchill

29.

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

Mark Twain

30.

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

31.

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

Edward Young

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

34.

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.

Pearson, Hesketh

35.

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

36.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

37.

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

Andre Malraux

38.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

42.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

43.

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

Brendan Francis

44.

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

Cross, Amanda

45.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

46.

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

47.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

48.

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

Robert Benchley

49.

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

Dorothy Parker

50.

Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor