Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Orson Welles

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

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

Andre Malraux

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

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

Hassan, Ihab

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

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

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

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

Edward Young

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

13.

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

Doctor Who

14.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

15.

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

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

17.

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

18.

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

Ambrose Bierce

19.

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

20.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

21.

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

Benjamin, Walter

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

25.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

26.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

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

28.

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

C. E. Montague

29.

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

Odets, Clifford

30.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

David H. Comins

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

35.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Morely, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

Robert Chapman

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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 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

45.

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

H. L. Mencken

46.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

47.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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

Cross, Amanda