Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

- David H. Comins

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

C. E. Montague

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

Sophocles

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

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

Robert M. Hamilton

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Edward Young

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

Mark Twain

10.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Debord, Guy

11.

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

Rudyard Kipling

12.

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

Odets, Clifford

13.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

14.

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

15.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.

Alfred North Whitehead

16.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

17.

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

18.

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

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.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21.

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

Benjamin, Walter

22.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

David H. Comins

24.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

25.

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

Andre Malraux

26.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Seneca

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

George Bernard Shaw

33.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

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.

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

Hassan, Ihab

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Dan Quayle

44.

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

H. L. Mencken

45.

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

46.

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

Talmud, The

47.

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

48.

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

Brendan Francis

49.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

50.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Orson Welles