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Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
-Anon.
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One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
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Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings.
-William R. Alger
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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
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
-W. H. Auden
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When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
-James Baldwin
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The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
-Robert Benchley
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
-Walter Benjamin
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The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
-Ambrose Bierce
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One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.
-Augustine Birrell, Alexander Pope
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Life itself is a quotation.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Next to being witty yourself, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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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.
-Gelett Burgess
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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
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Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.
-Robert Byrne, The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Sources, References, and Notes, 1984.
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It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.
-Elias Canetti
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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
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Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters; first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims, 1825
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A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
-Robert Chapman
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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, quoted in Rudolf Flesch, ed., The New Book of Unusual Quotations (NY: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 311
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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
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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
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That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
-Amanda Cross
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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
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Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.
-Guy Debord
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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
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The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
-Isaac Disraeli
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The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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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
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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
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Our best thoughts come from others.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
-Clifton Fadiman
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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
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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
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Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come.
-W. I. E. Gates
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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 von Goethe
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Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
-Johann von Goethe
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I improve on misquotation.
-Cary Grant
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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
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Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
-Ihab Hassan
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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
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Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
-Sir Arthur Helps
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Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
-Samuel Johnson
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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
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Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
-Samuel Johnson
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He wrapped himself in quotations
-Rudyard Kipling
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Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
-Janet Malcolm
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Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.
-Andre Malraux
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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-H. L. Mencken
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I quote others in order to better express myself.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.
-John Morley
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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
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There are two kinds of marriages -- where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.
-Clifford Odets
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A book that furnishes no quotations is no book -- it is a plaything.
-Thomas Love Peacock
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
-George Bernard Shaw
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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
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To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
-Alexander Smith
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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
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
-Susan Sontag
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
-Tom Stoppard
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Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
-Simeon Strunsky
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A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.
-The Talmud
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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
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Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
-Orson Welles
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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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
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Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-Oscar Wilde
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I not only use all the brains I have but all I can borrow.
-Woodrow Wilson
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A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
-Lord Peter Wimsey
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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.
-Virginia Woolf
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Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and think they grow immortal as they quote.
-Edward Young
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Books about Quotations
