340 Quotations Quotes to share with friends and relatives

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation. – Louis Menand, “Notable Quotables: Is there anything that is not a quotation?” 20

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue. – Isaac D’Israeli, “Quotation,” A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature

Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize. – Isaac D’Israeli, “Quotation,” A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature

Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired. – Attributed to Richard Kemph

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. – Attributed to W. Somerset Maugham

A man, groundly learned already, may take much profit himself in using by epitome to draw other men’s works, for his own memory sake, into short room. – Roger Ascham

Great quotation collections glean the millennia, distill essences, and battle for bragging rights about who’s bigger, who’s smarter, who’s best. Who-knows-who-said-what has a market, a history, and a hall of fame. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

Epigram: 1.A vividly expressed truth that is so, or not, as the case may be. 2.A dash of wit and a jigger of wisdom, flavored with surprise. – Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on R

A beautiful verse, an apt remark, or a well-turned phrase, appropriately quoted, is always effective and charming. – Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond du Deffand

I never have found the perfect quote. At best I have been able to find a string of quotations which merely circle the ineffable idea I seek to express. – Attributed to Caldwell O’Keefe in The Trademark Reporter, Vol.93, 2003

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson

The study of proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme of philosophy. – Attributed to Motherwell in Pearls of Thought by Maturin M. Ballou, 1882

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. – Edward Lytton Bulwer

The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed. – Johann Lavater

The more an idea is developed, the more concise becomes its expression: the more a tree is pruned, the better is the fruit. – Alfred Bougeart, quoted in A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedn

Nevertheless, a maxim does not necessarily become a proverb. Many grubs never grow to butterflies; and a maxim is only a proverb in its caterpillar stage—a candidate for a wider sphere and longer flight than most are destined to attain. – “Proverbs Secular and Sacred,” The North British Review, February 1858

As proverbs are meant to be portable, it is essential that they should be packed up in few words… – “Proverbs Secular and Sacred,” The North British Review, February 1858

A proverb is an exploding atom of wisdom. – Gaston Kaboré

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning. – Gaston Kaboré

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. – Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, 2012