 
|
Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
-Anon.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.
-Augustine Birrell
Alexander Pope
|
|
|
|
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.
-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
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.
-Elias Canetti
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
-Robert Chapman
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
Books about Quotations
