Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Wilson, Woodrow T.

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Seneca

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

Edwin P. Whipple

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

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

Odets, Clifford

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Anatole France

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

Fadiman, Clifton

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Dan Quayle

13.

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

Samuel Johnson

14.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

15.

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

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Cross, Amanda

24.

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

Robert Benchley

25.

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

Benjamin, Walter

26.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

27.

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

28.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

29.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

30.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

31.

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

Hassan, Ihab

32.

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

33.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

34.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

35.

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

Doctor Who

36.

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

Edward Young

37.

A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.

Talmud, The

38.

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

Robert Chapman

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

43.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

44.

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

Ambrose Bierce

45.

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

46.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

47.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

48.

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

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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

C. E. Montague