Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

I not only use all the brains I have but all I can borrow.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

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

C. E. Montague

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

Dan Quayle

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

H. L. Mencken

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

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

10.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

11.

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

Hassan, Ihab

12.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

13.

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

14.

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

Rudyard Kipling

15.

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

Benjamin, Walter

16.

Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.

Noonan, Peggy

17.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

18.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Anatole France

19.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Alfred North Whitehead

20.

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

Brendan Francis

21.

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

Odets, Clifford

22.

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

Morely, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

29.

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

David H. Comins

30.

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

Robert Benchley

31.

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

Orson Welles

32.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

33.

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

Seneca

34.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

37.

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

Mark Twain

38.

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

39.

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

40.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

Doctor Who

42.

Quotation... A writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful or witty, or because he expects them to touch a cord of association in his reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised; the discerning reader detects it and is contemptuous; the undiscerning is perhaps impressed, but even then is at the same time repelled, pretentious quotations being the surest road to tedium.

Fowler, Henry W.

43.

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

Samuel Johnson

44.

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

45.

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

George Bernard Shaw

46.

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

47.

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

Edward Young

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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