Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Samuel Johnson

Best Quotes about Quotations

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

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

Dan Quayle

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

Odets, Clifford

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

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

Samuel Johnson

10.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

11.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12.

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

13.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

14.

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

15.

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

C. E. Montague

16.

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.

17.

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

H. L. Mencken

18.

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

Malcolm, Janet

19.

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

Baldwin, James

20.

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

21.

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

Hassan, Ihab

22.

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

Robert Benchley

23.

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

Edward Young

24.

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

Doctor Who

25.

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

David H. Comins

26.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

27.

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

Samuel Johnson

28.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

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.

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

Benjamin, Walter

36.

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

37.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

38.

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

39.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Rudyard Kipling

43.

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

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

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

Orson Welles

47.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

48.

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

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy