Quotes

I love quotes! Why? Why care about a bundle of sentences tagged with a name? At first glance, they seem like useless chaff, like infoworms that are better optimized for lending hollow credibility than improving a piece. They're cliché. They're overused. They are, by definition, parroting the ideas of others. Why care?

Why quote?

The Great Conversation

Here I'll talk about "citation" and "quotation." Citation is when someone refers to something that someone has said or written down earlier to connect old ideas with their own. Quotation is a subset of citation where the writer inserts text from an earlier author in a piece (hopefully with a (correct) label to the source).

"Nothing is new under the sun." (Ecc. 1:9)

No idea is new, ideas are always mixtures of older ideas incubated in new circumstances. The reason we have citation is to remember our antecedents and to acknowledge what we owe to those who came before. Far from being prententious, citation done right is a sign of humility.

It also helps the speaker add ethos to their argument by tying it to ideas or people that the audience might already have a connection to. Citations alone do not make an idea credible, but they do help.

Aside from adding credibility, citation points the reader to the history of an idea. This helps the reader because they can then go back to the earlier author to learn more about the idea and how it originally developed, whether for the sake of supporting or rebutting it. For this reason, I think that a good citation should point to a source that has a lot to say about the given topic. It's lazy and misleading to cite something that, in the original source, was only an aside and not an important argument, because then the reader would trace the quote back to its source and find nothing.

Quotes are beautiful, in fact, they're the type of citation most optimized for beauty. Why? Because the best quotes are pithy, and pithy quotes stamp the mind with their ideas. Aside from just improving the intellectual content of a piece of writing, they can also improve its aesthetics. This isn't smoke-and-mirrors manipulation, it's just good writing: the truth should be made beautiful when it can be.

Citations and quotes don't have to be textual by the way, especially nowadays. Pictures are quotes, and so are memes. You can also cite video and audio. That being said, most internet writing happens on social media, and the tools for video and audio embedding on most social medias... could still be better. There's still a lot more that can be done here. For many programming tutorials, even programs can be citations, whether the code is copy-pasted into the essay or a compiler that runs the code is embedded in the essay.

The Quote of the Day

I think everyone has moments, sometimes, where they read something that sends shivers down their back. Just a few dozen words that strike them as incredibly important, as words to memorize or even to live by. It's happened to me quite a few times, and for the past couple of years whenever that has happened to me, I put the quote in an archive. This is an opportunity to share that archive with others while also making the homepage a little more interesting.

Most of the quotes come from either the archive or Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2002). I plan to add more quotes, especially from Bartlett's and Wikiquotes, in the future. This is very much a work in progress.

Especially in the case of translated quotes, I have sometimes edited the quote, usually to use less archaic language and/or to replace "he" with "they" in general observations about human individuals. I've always preserved the original meaning of the quote, modifying only the wording.

A lot of quotes are almost always misattributed, so I've tried to avoid that by checking beforehand with Quote Investigator. If a quote is usually misattributed, but I still want to keep it, I leave the author field blank.

Unattributed quotes are either anonymous, have no verified source, or come from my personal life.