Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Hassan, Ihab

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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

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

Robert M. Hamilton

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Gates, W. I. E.

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

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

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

Oscar Wilde

10.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

11.

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

C. E. Montague

12.

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

13.

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

Samuel Johnson

14.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

15.

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

16.

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

Odets, Clifford

17.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

18.

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

David H. Comins

19.

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

20.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

21.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

22.

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

23.

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

Orson Welles

24.

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

25.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Edward Young

29.

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

30.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

31.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

32.

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

33.

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

Morely, John

34.

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

35.

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

Doctor Who

36.

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

George Bernard Shaw

37.

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

Talmud, The

38.

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

39.

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

Cross, Amanda

40.

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

Benjamin, Walter

41.

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

42.

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

Dan Quayle

43.

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

44.

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

Seneca

45.

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

Rudyard Kipling

46.

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

47.

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

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.

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

50.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo