Quotations Quotes

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

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

Walter Benjamin

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

Robert Benchley

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

Andre Malraux

One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.

Augustine Birrell, Alexander Pop

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

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

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

Amos Bronson Alcott

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

The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Ambrose Bierce

Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.

Anon.

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

Johann von Goethe

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

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

Robert Chapman

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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