Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Dan Quayle

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Seneca

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

David H. Comins

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

Fadiman, Clifton

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Baldwin, James

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

10.

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

Andre Malraux

11.

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

12.

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

Oscar Wilde

13.

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

Dan Quayle

14.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

15.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

16.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Robert Benchley

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Cross, Amanda

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

C. E. Montague

28.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Malcolm, Janet

32.

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

33.

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

Morely, John

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

37.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

38.

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

H. L. Mencken

39.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

40.

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

Talmud, The

41.

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

Samuel Johnson

42.

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

Orson Welles

43.

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

George Bernard Shaw

44.

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

Robert Chapman

45.

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

46.

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

Rudyard Kipling

47.

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

Benjamin, Walter

48.

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

Hassan, Ihab

49.

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