Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Quotations

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author.
Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist

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 (1913–95) Canadian Novelist, Playwright, Essayist

Have at you with a proverb.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright

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 (1803–82) American Philosopher

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote,—We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religions, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that everything must soon be reduced to extracts.
Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author

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.’
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) British Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Journalist, Author

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.—What he quotes he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

Whoever reads only to transcribe or quote shining remarks without entering into the genius and spirit of the author, will be apt to be misled out of a regular way of thinking, and the product of all this will be found to be a manifest incoherent piece of patchwork.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
Arthur Helps (1813–75) British Essayist, Historian

I shall never be ashamed to quote a bad author if what he says is good.
Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist

If these little sparks of holy fire thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy.
Jeremy Taylor

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright

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 (1925–2015) Egypt-born American Literary Theorist, Writer

In literature, quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.
Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer

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 (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.
Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram.
Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86) American Literary Critic

Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and think they grow immortal as they quote.
Edward Young (1683–1765) English Poet

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 (1909–72) American Community Organizer, Political Theorist

It is the beauty and independent worth of the citations, far more than their appropriateness, which have made Johnson’s Dictionary popular even as a reading-book.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher

The best ideas are common property.
Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian

I have only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist

Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their expression, for thoughts are grains of sugar or salt, that must be melted in a drop of water.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn (1792–1870) French-Swiss Lyric Poet

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist

I quote others in order to better express myself.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist

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