Quotes About Quotations

Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

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

[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations...

As a comedian, I'm always quoting 'Caddyshack' and 'Dumb and Dumber.'

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

Always let your conscience be your guide is advice of doubtful value. Conscience must be, among other things, a list of sayings, an anthology of quotations and precepts. Where did they come from, and who first wrote them on my empty slate, and why?

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Quotology disdains no quotations whatsoever, a duty it bears stoutly, with bloodshot eyes and sagging shelves.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations . . . The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.

There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence [in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations]. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.

You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

I didn't really say everything I said.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then.

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery.

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.

As in the earlier debate over "socialism in one country," Stalin studded his speeches with Lenin quotations and represented the views he was advocating as Leninism. There was never any suggestion that his special amalgam of Russocentrism and a revolutionary approach in building socialism could be called "Stalinism.

Reporters would just use the most interesting (and, usually, unhelpful) sound bites in my lengthy responses to their questions, instead of writing about the message that we wanted to get out that particular day.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations.

I've compiled a book from the Internet. It's a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people.

I knew that the late Zalewski, rest his soul, despite his motto, literally drank himself to death. His wife had on other occasions told me so often enough. But that didn't worry her. She used her husband as other folk do the Bible—for quotations. And the longer he was dead the harder she worked him. He now had something for all occasions—just like the Bible.

At intervals as he rounded the room he would stop "to release some priceless quotation or thought." During one such pause, Churchill likened a man's life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. "As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage." He danced on.