Motivational Quotes

Quotations

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

Best Quotes about Quotations

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Mark Twain

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Samuel Johnson

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

Cross, Amanda

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

Odets, Clifford

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

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

Robert M. Hamilton

10.

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

Anatole France

11.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

12.

Life itself is a quotation.

Jorge Luis Borges

13.

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

H. L. Mencken

14.

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

Morely, John

15.

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

Peacock, Thomas Love

16.

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

Brendan Francis

17.

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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

18.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

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

Doctor Who

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Edward Young

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Benjamin, Walter

27.

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

28.

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

Gates, W. I. E.

29.

I not only use all the brains I have but all I can borrow.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Malcolm, Janet

35.

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

Robert Benchley

36.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

37.

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

Robert Chapman

38.

I didn't really say everything I said.

Yogi Berra

39.

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

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.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hassan, Ihab

44.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

45.

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.

Hesketh Pearson

46.

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