340 Quotations Quotes to share with friends and relatives

An epigram is a gag that’s played Carnegie Hall. – Oscar Levant (Thanks, Garson O’Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)

I swim across a sea of quotes, splashing in the words and riding the waves of wisdom. – Terri Guillemets

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. – Author unknown

It is probably to Talleyrand, that Receiver-General of waif wit and estray epigram, that more sayings have been wrongly attributed than to any other modern. – William Mathews, “Quotation and Misquotation,” in North American Review, January

One of the great attractions of quotations is that they are rich in ideas which can be tailored to specific purposes. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations

A proper collection of quotations is the whole world digested. – Terri Guillemets

The aphorist sees in every truth a wise saying, and in every contradiction, two wise sayings. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

If you don’t quote yourself, nobody else will. And you can quote me on that. – Scott Ginsberg, www.hellomynameisscott.com

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly. – Virginia Woolf

You might not be able to answer a question with a question but you can always answer a question with a quote! – Hunter Brinkmeier

[T]here are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. – Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, 1963, translated from Russian by Michael Scammell

Good quotations, like good thoughts, are true wealth. – Annie E. Lancaster, quoted in Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopædia of Pros

You will find professed quotations from authors, of the correctness of which you will not be satisfied; and how important is it to be able to satisfy yourself by examining the originals! – Theodore Dwight, quoted in President Dwight’s Decisions of Questions Discu

There are many famous, sometimes brilliant and often very great quotations attributed to notable persons, which though false or incorrect, are usually improvements by anonymous requoters. – George Seldes

Proverbs generalize the verdicts of the world. – Terri Guillemets

A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor. – James Ellis, quoted in Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopædia of Prose Quota

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge. – Thomas Hood

To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones. – Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own. – James Russell Lowell

Collections of gnomes, adages, sayings, and parables have been made from times immemorial in all countries and in all languages possessing some kind of literature. – E.H. Michelsen, A Manual of Quotations from the Ancient, Modern, and Oriental La