Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Oscar Wilde

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Edward Young

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Malcolm, Janet

13.

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

Ambrose Bierce

14.

Next to being witty yourself, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

15.

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

C. E. Montague

16.

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

Robert Benchley

17.

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

Hassan, Ihab

18.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

19.

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

20.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

21.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

22.

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

Morely, John

23.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

24.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Rudyard Kipling

27.

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

28.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Dan Quayle

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Anatole France

36.

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

Robert Chapman

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.

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

Brendan Francis

39.

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

40.

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

Mark Twain

41.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

42.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

43.

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

44.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

45.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

46.

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

Seneca

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

50.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson