Quotes about Quotations

"A witty saying proves nothing."
-Voltaire

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before."
-Mark Twain

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

"A short saying oft contains much wisdom."
-Sophocles

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."
-George Bernard Shaw

"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

"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

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

"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

"He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."
-Rudyard Kipling

"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language."
-Samuel Johnson

"Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world."
-Samuel Johnson

"To be amused by what you read--that is the great spring of happy quotations."
-C. E. Montague

"When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it."
-Anatole France

"Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything."
-Andre Malraux

"Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote."
-Edward Young

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself."
-Marlene Dietrich

"Life itself is a quotation."
-Jorge Luis Borges

"What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first."
-David H. Comins

"For men are prone to go it blind along the calf-paths of the mindTo do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track, and out and in, and forth and back, and still their devious course pursue, to keep the path that others do."
-Sam Walter Foss

"A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority."
-Brendan Francis

"Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?"
-Philip G. Hamerton

"I didn't really say everything I said."
-Yogi Berra

"An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly."
-Edwin P. Whipple