Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Brendan Francis

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

C. E. Montague

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

Anatole France

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

Hassan, Ihab

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

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

Samuel Johnson

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

David H. Comins

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

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

Edwin P. Whipple

10.

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

11.

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

Brendan Francis

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.

Hesketh Pearson

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Andre Malraux

17.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

18.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Robert Benchley

23.

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

24.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

25.

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

Baldwin, James

26.

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

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

34.

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

35.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

36.

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

Odets, Clifford

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

George Bernard Shaw

40.

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

41.

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

H. L. Mencken

42.

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

43.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

44.

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

Dan Quayle

45.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

46.

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

Robert Chapman

47.

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

Mark Twain

48.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

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

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