Quotes about quotations

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings.

— William R. Alger

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.

— Saul Alinsky

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

— James Baldwin

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

— Robert Benchley

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

— Walter Benjamin

The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

— Ambrose Bierce

Life itself is a quotation.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Christian Nevell Bovee

Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow -- I'm sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you, anyhow, I'll kill you if you quote it.

— (Frank) Gelett Burgess

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

— Robert Burns

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

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

— Robert Chapman

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.

— Winston Churchill

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.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

— Amanda Cross

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.

— Robertson Davies

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

— Guy Debord

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.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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

— Isaac Disraeli

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our best thoughts come from others.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Clifton Fadiman

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.

— Henry W. Fowler

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

— W. I. E. Gates

Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I improve on misquotation.

— Cary Grant

Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.

— Louise Imogen Guiney

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

— Ihab Hassan

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.

— Ihab Hassan

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

— Samuel Johnson

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Janet Malcolm

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

— Andre Malraux

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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

— H. L. Mencken

I quote others in order to better express myself.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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

— John Morely

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.

— Peggy Noonan

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

— Clifford Odets

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

— Thomas Love Peacock

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

Apothegms to thinking minds are the seeds from which spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged.

— James Ramsey

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

— Joseph Roux

In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

— John Selden

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

— Seneca

The proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly exploded in the air.

— William Gilmore Simms

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

— Alexander Smith

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?

— Dame Ethel Smyth

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.

— Susan Sontag

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

— Tom Stoppard

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

— Simeon Strunsky

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

— The Talmud

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Woodrow T. Wilson

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

— Lord Peter Wimsey

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

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Edward Young

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who dislike animals (and more specifically those who never had a pet) will never understand the complete joy a pet brings to a soul, and, the pet-less person will never truly understand the meaning of unconditional love.

— threston, t.r.