Quotes on Quotations

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.

Certain brief sentences are peerless in their ability to give one the feeling that nothing remains to be said.

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.

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.

In the dime stores and bus stations
 People talk of situations
 Read books, repeat quotations
 Draw conclusions on the wall
 Some speak of the future
 My love she speaks softly
 She knows there’s no success like failure
 And that failure’s no success at all -Bob Dylan, “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” (1965)

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'. ... 'You’d be surprised' wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.