Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

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

Brendan Francis

10.

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

Hassan, Ihab

11.

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

12.

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

Samuel Johnson

13.

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

14.

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

Odets, Clifford

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

H. L. Mencken

17.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

18.

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

19.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

20.

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

Robert Chapman

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Malcolm, Janet

24.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

25.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

26.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

27.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

28.

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

Andre Malraux

29.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

30.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

34.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

35.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

37.

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.

38.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

39.

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

40.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

41.

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

42.

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

Benjamin, Walter

43.

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

44.

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

Edward Young

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.

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

47.

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

Orson Welles

48.

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

Samuel Johnson

49.

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