Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Wilson, Woodrow T.

Best Quotes about Quotations

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

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

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

Talmud, The

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

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

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

Dan Quayle

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Morely, John

10.

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

Oscar Wilde

11.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

13.

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

Malcolm, Janet

14.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

15.

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

16.

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

Doctor Who

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

22.

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

Mark Twain

23.

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

24.

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

25.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

28.

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

29.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

30.

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

David H. Comins

31.

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

Robert Benchley

32.

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

Baldwin, James

33.

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

Andre Malraux

34.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

35.

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.

36.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

37.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

38.

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

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.

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

H. L. Mencken

41.

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

Samuel Johnson

42.

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

C. E. Montague

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Anatole France

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Robert Chapman

49.

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

50.

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

Cross, Amanda