Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- Bovee, Christian Nevell

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

C. E. Montague

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

David H. Comins

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

Rudyard Kipling

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

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

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.

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

Robert Benchley

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin, Walter

14.

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

Robert Chapman

15.

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

Seneca

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

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

Edwin P. Whipple

19.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

20.

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

Edward Young

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Malcolm, Janet

23.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

24.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

28.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

Odets, Clifford

31.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

35.

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

Baldwin, James

36.

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

37.

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

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.

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

Dan Quayle

40.

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

41.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

42.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

43.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

44.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

45.

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

46.

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

Oscar Wilde

47.

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

Mark Twain

48.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles