Motivational Quotes

Quotations

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

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

Robert M. Hamilton

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

Andre Malraux

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

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

Gates, W. I. E.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

13.

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

14.

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

Samuel Johnson

15.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

16.

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

Brendan Francis

17.

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

David H. Comins

18.

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

19.

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

Samuel Johnson

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Dan Quayle

23.

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

Anatole France

24.

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

Hassan, Ihab

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Baldwin, James

27.

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

Mark Twain

28.

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

29.

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

30.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

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

Seneca

33.

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

34.

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

Talmud, The

35.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

36.

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

Orson Welles

37.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

38.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

Morely, John

40.

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

H. L. Mencken

41.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

42.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

43.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Rudyard Kipling

49.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

50.

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