The best quotes don't speak to one particular truth, but rather to universal truths that resonate — across time, culture, gender, generation, and situation — in our own hearts and minds. They guide, motivate, validate, challenge, and comfort us in our own lives. They reiterate what we've figured out and remind us how much there is yet to learn. Pithily and succinctly, they lift us momentarily out of the confused and conflicted human muddle. Most of all, they tell us we're not alone. Their existence is proof that others have questioned, grappled with, and come to know the same truths we question and grapple with, too.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

How we each imagine God says more about us than it does about gods.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

What we know matters, but who we are matters more.

Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.

Sometimes we know a person better than we can say, or at least than we do say.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

Some people, after having read a book, quote certain passages which they do not thoroughly understand, and moreover completely change their character by what they put in of their own. Those passages, so mutilated and disfigured that they are nothing else but their own expressions and thoughts, they expose to censure, maintain them to be bad, and the world agrees with them; but the passage such critics think they quote, and in reality do not, is not a bit the worse for it.

We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority

I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.