Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

Edwin P. Whipple

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Cross, Amanda

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

Oscar Wilde

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Rudyard Kipling

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

10.

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

Baldwin, James

11.

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

Talmud, The

12.

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

Andre Malraux

13.

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

14.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Orson Welles

19.

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

Morely, John

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.

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

Fadiman, Clifton

22.

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

Robert Benchley

23.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

Marlene Dietrich

24.

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

25.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

26.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

27.

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

28.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

29.

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

Malcolm, Janet

30.

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

31.

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

Odets, Clifford

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Seneca

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

C. E. Montague

39.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

40.

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

Robert M. Hamilton

41.

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

David H. Comins

42.

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

43.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

44.

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

45.

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

46.

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

Doctor Who

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

I quote others in order to better express myself.