Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Samuel Johnson

Best Quotes about Quotations

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

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

Baldwin, James

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

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

Gates, W. I. E.

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

Dan Quayle

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

10.

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

11.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

12.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

13.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Robert Chapman

17.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

22.

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

Morely, John

23.

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

24.

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

Ambrose Bierce

25.

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

Cross, Amanda

26.

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

Benjamin, Walter

27.

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

28.

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

Orson Welles

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

David H. Comins

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Samuel Johnson

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Anatole France

40.

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

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

42.

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

Brendan Francis

43.

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

Andre Malraux

44.

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

Edward Young

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

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

Malcolm, Janet

47.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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.

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

Doctor Who

50.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw