Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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

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

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

Anatole France

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, James

12.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

13.

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

14.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

15.

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

16.

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

Orson Welles

17.

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

Morely, John

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

20.

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

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

Hassan, Ihab

22.

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

Ambrose Bierce

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

25.

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

Mark Twain

26.

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

27.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

29.

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

Wilson, Woodrow T.

30.

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

Seneca

31.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

32.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

33.

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

34.

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

Samuel Johnson

35.

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

Rudyard Kipling

36.

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

37.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

38.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

39.

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

40.

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?