Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- David H. Comins

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Kipling, Rudyard

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Orson Welles

10.

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

Andre Malraux

11.

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

Cross, Amanda

12.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

13.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

17.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

18.

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

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.

Joseph Roux

21.

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

Hassan, Ihab

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

H. L. Mencken

30.

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

31.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

32.

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

33.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

34.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

35.

A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool.

Roux, Joseph

36.

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

Doctor Who

37.

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

Benjamin, Walter

38.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

39.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

40.

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

41.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

42.

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

Seneca

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia