Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Edwin P. Whipple

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

C. E. Montague

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

Odets, Clifford

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

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

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

Doctor Who

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

Edwin P. Whipple

I quote others in order to better express myself.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

11.

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

12.

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

Edward Young

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Andre Malraux

16.

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

17.

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

18.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

22.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Ambrose Bierce

26.

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

Brendan Francis

27.

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

Dan Quayle

28.

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

29.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

30.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

31.

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

32.

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

Talmud, The

33.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

34.

A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool.

Roux, Joseph

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

37.

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

38.

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

39.

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

Hassan, Ihab

40.

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

Seneca

41.

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

Robert Chapman

42.

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

43.

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

George Bernard Shaw

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

H. L. Mencken

47.

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

Baldwin, James

48.

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

49.

I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

Burns, Robert

50.

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