Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Robert Benchley

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

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

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Baldwin, James

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

Robert M. Hamilton

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

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

10.

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

Rudyard Kipling

11.

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

12.

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

C. E. Montague

13.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

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

Andre Malraux

16.

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

Mark Twain

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Anatole France

20.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

21.

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

David H. Comins

22.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

23.

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

24.

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

Robert Chapman

25.

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

Morely, John

26.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

27.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

28.

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

Malcolm, Janet

29.

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

Ambrose Bierce

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.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

32.

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

33.

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

Seneca

34.

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

35.

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

Orson Welles

36.

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

37.

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

Odets, Clifford

38.

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

Doctor Who

39.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

40.

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

Cross, Amanda

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Dan Quayle

45.

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

46.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

47.

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

Oscar Wilde

48.

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

Samuel Johnson

49.

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

Hassan, Ihab

50.

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.