Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- H. L. Mencken

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Brendan Francis

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

Baldwin, James

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

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

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

Andre Malraux

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

Mark Twain

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

H. L. Mencken

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.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

14.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

15.

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

Ambrose Bierce

16.

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

Rudyard Kipling

17.

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

18.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

19.

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

20.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

21.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

22.

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

Dan Quayle

23.

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

24.

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

Edward Young

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.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

27.

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

David H. Comins

28.

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

Orson Welles

29.

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

Odets, Clifford

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.

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

32.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

33.

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

34.

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

Malcolm, Janet

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

38.

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

Samuel Johnson

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.

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

41.

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

Hassan, Ihab

42.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

43.

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

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.

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

C. E. Montague

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Anatole France

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Johnson

50.

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

Benjamin Disraeli