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| Classical quotation is a parole of literary men all over the world. ~ Samuel Johnson |
| Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to get somewhat chiseled, as it were, before it will fit into an epigram. ~ Joseph Farrell |
| In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse. ~ Evelyn Waugh, |
| The maxims of men disclose their hearts. ~ French Proverb |
| An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject. ~ Robert Brault |
| Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind. ~ Leo Rosten |
| To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler. ~ Terri Guillemets |
| I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors. ~ Benjamin Franklin, "Preface," |
| Patch grief with proverbs. ~ William Shakespeare |
| Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. ~ Santayana, |
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| The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. ~ Aldous Huxley |
| Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. ~ H.L. Mencken |
| One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats and one always secretes too much jelly. ~ Virginia Woolf |
| There are aphorisms that, like air planes, stay up only while they are in motion. ~ Vladimir Nabokov |
| Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted. ~ Hesketh Pearson |
| By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Someone might say of me that I have only made a bouquet of other people’s flowers here, having supplied nothing of my own but the thread to bind them. ~ Michel de Montaigne |