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Quotation of the day
Friday, 5 September 2008
Daily Quote:
"Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better." (Burney, Charles - Unity)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Quotations

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book -- it is a plaything.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool.
A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished.
A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
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.
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.
Apothegms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feelings.
Apothegms to thinking minds are the seeds from which spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged.
Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.
He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.
He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
He wrapped himself in quotations -- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
I improve on misquotation.
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!
I not only use all the brains I have but all I can borrow.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.
I quote others in order to better express myself.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.
In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Life itself is a quotation.
Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Next to being witty yourself, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
Our best thoughts come from others.
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.
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.
Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
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.
Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and think they grow immortal as they quote.
Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come.
That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.
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?
The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
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.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
There are two kinds of marriages -- where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
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.
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.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, and opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.
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.

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