Quotation Quotes

187 Sourced quotes

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit...

W. Somerset Maugham

Every quotation is out of context because the context of everything is everything and you can't transmit that … To be the most misquoted is to be the most quoted [man in British politics] and I'll settle for the combination.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

We will encourage reporters to be as specific as possible about the source of any anonymous quotation.

Alan Rusbridger

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

John Jay Chapman

A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

Robertson Davies

Books are published with an expectation, if not a desire, that they will be criticised in reviews, and if deemed valuable that parts of them will be used as affording illustrations by way of quotation, or the like, and if the quantity taken be neither substantial nor material, if, as it has been expressed by some Judges, "a fair use" only be made of the publication, no wrong is done and no action can be brought.

William Wood, 1st Baron Hatherley

It was often difficult to think of an apt quotation when one was in a hurry.

An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.

Willard van Orman Quine

A quotation is what a speaker wants to say—unlike a soundbite which is all that an interviewer allows you to say.

A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."

Margery Allingham

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

Robert W. Chapman

I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.

The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.

Richard Feynman

My impression of the American people can be summarized by a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, "Those things that hurt instruct!" I realised that people in this part of the world meet their problems head on. They attempt to get out of them rather than suffer them.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over.

I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

A quotation is a polished prefabricated unit of thought or discourse which has many connotations and associations built into it. It is thus like the text for a sermon, serving as a point of departure for many lines of thought.

Alan Lindsay Mackay

Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.

Isaac D'Israeli

There were moments when his memory failed him; and he would forget to eat dinner, though he never forgot a quotation.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors...

It is surprising to see what superficial, inconsequential reasonings satisfy the most part of mankind. A piece of wit, a jest, a simile, or a quotation of an Author, passes for a mighty argument.... This weakness and effeminacy of mankind in being persuaded where they are delighted, have made them the sport of orators, poets, and men of wit.

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?