Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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

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

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

10.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

11.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

12.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

13.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

14.

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

15.

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

Doctor Who

16.

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

17.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

18.

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

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.

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

Andre Malraux

21.

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

Orson Welles

22.

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

David H. Comins

23.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

C. E. Montague

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

29.

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

Robert Chapman

30.

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

Benjamin, Walter

31.

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

Odets, Clifford

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

Oscar Wilde

34.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

35.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

36.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Ambrose Bierce

40.

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

Malcolm, Janet

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 often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw

43.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

44.

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

Talmud, The

45.

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

Dan Quayle

46.

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

Hassan, Ihab

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

50.

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

Samuel Johnson