Motivational Quotes

Quotations

Our best thoughts come from others.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

C. E. Montague

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

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

Talmud, The

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Samuel Johnson

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

10.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

11.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

12.

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

Dan Quayle

13.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

14.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

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.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

17.

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

18.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

19.

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

Odets, Clifford

20.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

21.

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

22.

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

Malcolm, Janet

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

27.

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

28.

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

Hassan, Ihab

29.

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

Anatole France

30.

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

Doctor Who

31.

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

Robert Benchley

32.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

33.

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

34.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

35.

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

Edward Young

36.

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

37.

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

Seneca

38.

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

39.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

40.

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

Morely, John

41.

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

Cross, Amanda

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

43.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

48.

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

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.

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

Ambrose Bierce