Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Oscar Wilde

Sontag, Susan

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Rudyard Kipling

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

C. E. Montague

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

10.

Next to being witty yourself, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

12.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

13.

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

H. L. Mencken

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Malcolm, Janet

18.

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

19.

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

Cross, Amanda

20.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

21.

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

David H. Comins

22.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

23.

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

Mark Twain

24.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Baldwin, James

28.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

29.

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

30.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

31.

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

Robert Benchley

32.

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

Odets, Clifford

33.

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

Benjamin, Walter

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Brendan Francis

37.

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

Ambrose Bierce

38.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

39.

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

Hassan, Ihab

40.

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

41.

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

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.

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

Edward Young

44.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

45.

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

46.

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