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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Orson Welles

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

George Bernard Shaw

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Doctor Who

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

Dan Quayle

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

10.

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

11.

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

C. E. Montague

12.

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

13.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

14.

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

Baldwin, James

15.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Morely, John

20.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Ambrose Bierce

25.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

26.

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

Rudyard Kipling

27.

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

Robert Benchley

28.

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

Cross, Amanda

29.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

30.

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

31.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

32.

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

Andre Malraux

33.

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

David H. Comins

34.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

35.

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

36.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

37.

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

38.

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

Odets, Clifford

39.

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

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

45.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Brendan Francis

49.

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

50.

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