Quotations Quotes

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

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

Simeon Strunsky

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

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

Amanda Cross

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

Thomas Love Peacock

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

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

Ihab Hassan

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

James Baldwin

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

Clifton Fadiman

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

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

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

Woodrow Wilson

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

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

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

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

I improve on misquotation.

Cary Grant

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