340 Quotations Quotes to share with friends and relatives

The truest sayings are paradoxical. – Laozi, as quoted in The Wisdom of the East: The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ, transla

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1923, quoted in Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspond

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011

All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who can condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character, or illustrates an existence. – Benjamin Disraeli

A vast meaning is unfolded in each line, with such power that a sentence only a line long would suffice for a whole life’s training. – Rufinus (translated from Latin), about The Sentences of Sextus

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words, but cannot a few well-spoken words convey as many pictures? – Author Unknown

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler. – Terri Guillemets

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind. – Francis H. Bradley, Aphorisms, 1930

Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted. – Hesketh Pearson

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. – Hesketh Pearson

Misquotation is quotology’s swamp. Amateur quoters mix and mangle Shakespeare and Scripture. Professors gaffe and printers bungle. It’s a mess we must wade into. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp… that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages! – William Mathews, “Self-Reliance,” Getting on in the World; Or, Hints on Success

The epigram is a handy weapon, having the keenness of the stiletto, and its glitter. – William Watson, “A Note on Epigram,” 1883 [a little altered —tε&#5511

What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking. – Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes in Excellent Quotations for Home and School

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come. – W.I.E. Gates, quoted in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times by Laurenc

Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world. – Arthur Helps, “Chapter IV,” Companions of My Solitude, 1851

One would think that a scissors and pastepot collection like this would require little help. Not true. A tribe of hunters and gatherers is required: there is so much to be seen for so little selected. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations

I have drag-netted the ocean, as well as the numerous narrow streams and wide rivers of literature… – Frank J. Wilstach, A Dictionary of Similes, 1916

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own…. It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. – James Gleick, 1993

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember. – John Mason Brown