340 Quotations Quotes to share with friends and relatives

The lips of the wise are as the doors of a cabinet; no sooner are they opened, but treasures are poured out before thee. Like unto trees of gold arranged in beds of silver, are wise sentences uttered in due season. – The Economy of Human Life, Translated from an Indian Manuscript, Written by an A

Miss Amesbury is especially happy in the use of quotations—and an apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence. – L.E. Landon, Romance and Reality, 1832

All quotation dictionaries stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, which must be consulted as part of the effort to make sure that no famous quotations are missed. – Fred R. Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, 2006 (Acknowledgements)

People will accept your idea more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first. – David H. Comins, quoted in The Washingtonian, Volume14, 1978

I’ve compiled a book from the Internet. It’s a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people. – Jerry Seinfeld

I never said half the crap people said I did. – Albert Einstein;)

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them. – Gary Saul Morson, “Bakhtin, The Genres of Quotation, and The Aphoristic Consciou

[D]ifferent people have different quotational gravity. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well. – Elias Canetti

Our live experiences fixed in aphorisms stiffen into cold epigram. Our heart’s blood, as we write with it, darkens into ink. – F.H. Bradley

QUOTATION, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays. – Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don’t think of until too late. – James Alexander Thom

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”

I am fully conscious of the fact, that aphorisms are like wandering Gypsies. They must always be published without guarantee of the authenticity. – Erkki Melartin

It’s such a pleasure to write down splendid words—almost as though one were inventing them. – Rupert Hart-Davis

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011

It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. – Franklin P. Jones

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it… – George Santayana, “Chapter VIII: Prerational Morality,” The Life of Reason: Volu

When two seemingly conflicting thoughts have made it to proverb or aphorism status, usually, in the ambivalence of life, both are true. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations