Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Anatole France

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

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

Robert Benchley

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

Dan Quayle

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

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

Samuel Johnson

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

11.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

12.

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

Brendan Francis

13.

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

George Bernard Shaw

14.

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

Seneca

15.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

16.

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

Baldwin, James

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

Morely, John

19.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

20.

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

21.

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

David H. Comins

22.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

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

24.

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

Andre Malraux

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Doctor Who

28.

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

29.

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

Robert Chapman

30.

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

Ambrose Bierce

31.

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

32.

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

Talmud, The

33.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

34.

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

Odets, Clifford

35.

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

36.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

37.

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

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

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

40.

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

Anatole France

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

46.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Samuel Johnson

47.

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

Malcolm, Janet

48.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

49.

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

50.

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