Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Edward Young

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

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

Edwin P. Whipple

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

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

Anatole France

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Cross, Amanda

11.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12.

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

Mark Twain

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Rudyard Kipling

17.

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

18.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

19.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Ambrose Bierce

21.

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

Morely, John

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

26.

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

Talmud, The

27.

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

Hassan, Ihab

28.

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

Benjamin, Walter

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

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

31.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

32.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

33.

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

Baldwin, James

34.

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.

35.

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

Doctor Who

36.

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Samuel Johnson

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Andre Malraux

43.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

44.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

45.

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