Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Edward Young

Best Quotes about Quotations

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

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

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

Cross, Amanda

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

Odets, Clifford

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

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

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

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

Edward Young

10.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

11.

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

Oscar Wilde

12.

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

Baldwin, James

13.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

14.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

15.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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.

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

20.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

21.

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

22.

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

Doctor Who

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Hassan, Ihab

28.

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

Rudyard Kipling

29.

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

Dan Quayle

30.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

31.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

32.

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

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

Ambrose Bierce

35.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

36.

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

Orson Welles

37.

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

38.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

49.

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

50.

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