Food For Thought

Frequently, with serious works and ones of great import, some purple patch or other is stitched on, to show up far and wide.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

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

Un bon mot ne prouve rien. (A witty saying proves nothing.)

"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!"

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

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.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

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?

Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a 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 chord 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.

I maintain yet that quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of filial reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.

He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.

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.

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

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

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.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.

The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn't sound so sensible in short snatches.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

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

An aphorism (this one of course excepted) can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit. It sells the part for the whole. Its plausibility derives from its concision, which stuns, and its wit, which dazzles. Hence our pleasure in it depends upon the partial arrest of our reasoning faculty. (This is true also of its homely cousins -- the proverb, the adage and the maxim; and of its flashy younger brothers -- the epigram and the paradox.) We enjoy it as we do oratory, debate and good conversation -- all minor arts that, like the aphorism, ignore those annoyances, the Exception and the Rounded View.

I improve in misquotation.

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 seen.

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

I have lifted this speech from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely 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 emblamatic fragments.

It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable...it's better to be quotable than honest.