Motivational Quotes

Quotations

Life itself is a quotation.

- Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

Anatole France

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

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

Andre Malraux

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Robert Chapman

10.

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

Benjamin, Walter

11.

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

C. E. Montague

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

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

14.

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

Edward Young

15.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Baldwin, James

20.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

21.

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

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.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

24.

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

David H. Comins

25.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

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.

Pearson, Hesketh

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

31.

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

32.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

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.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

35.

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

H. L. Mencken

36.

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

37.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

38.

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

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Seneca

41.

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

Ambrose Bierce

42.

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

43.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

44.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

45.

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

Odets, Clifford

46.

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

47.

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

Robert Benchley

48.

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

49.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

50.

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