Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

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

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

Morely, John

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Cross, Amanda

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

Benjamin, Walter

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

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.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

21.

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

Rudyard Kipling

22.

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

23.

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

Mark Twain

24.

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

Seneca

25.

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

Edward Young

26.

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

Ambrose Bierce

27.

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

28.

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

Robert Benchley

29.

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.

30.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

31.

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

32.

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

Andre Malraux

33.

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

34.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

35.

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

Malcolm, Janet

36.

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

C. E. Montague

37.

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

38.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

39.

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

Orson Welles

40.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

41.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

42.

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

43.

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

Doctor Who

44.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

49.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

50.

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