Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- C. E. Montague

Best Quotes about Quotations

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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

Brendan Francis

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

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

Dan Quayle

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

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

David H. Comins

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Gates, W. I. E.

10.

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

Seneca

11.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

12.

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

13.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

14.

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

15.

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

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.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

21.

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

22.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

23.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

24.

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

Malcolm, Janet

25.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

26.

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

Doctor Who

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

29.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

30.

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

George Bernard Shaw

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Odets, Clifford

35.

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

Cross, Amanda

36.

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

Talmud, The

37.

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

38.

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

Andre Malraux

39.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

40.

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

Morely, John

41.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

42.

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

Orson Welles

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.

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

45.

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

Hassan, Ihab

46.

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

Rudyard Kipling

47.

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

H. L. Mencken

48.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

49.

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

50.

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