Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Robert Benchley

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Orson Welles

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

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

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

Dorothy Parker

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

Malcolm, Janet

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

Brendan Francis

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

Morely, John

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.

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

Odets, Clifford

10.

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

11.

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

Seneca

12.

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

13.

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

H. L. Mencken

14.

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

15.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

19.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

20.

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

21.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

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

23.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

24.

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

Talmud, The

25.

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

Anatole France

26.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

27.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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.

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

30.

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

Benjamin, Walter

31.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

32.

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

33.

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

Dan Quayle

34.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

35.

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

Cross, Amanda

36.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

37.

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

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

Ambrose Bierce

39.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

40.

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

41.

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

Robert Benchley

42.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

43.

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

Doctor Who

44.

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

45.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

47.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

48.

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

49.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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

Rudyard Kipling