About Quotes

Quotes is a free collection of real quotations from writers, poets, thinkers and leaders who died before 1955. Every quotation names the person and the work it comes from.

Sources

All quotations are from works in the public domain:

• English literature: the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare; the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Jerome K. Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle; the plays and novel of Oscar Wilde; the books of Mark Twain; the poems named on the English poets page.
• Essays and speeches: Francis Bacon's Essays; Alexander Pope; Samuel Johnson and Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791); Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1732 to 1758) and letters; Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays; Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849); speeches and documents of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Translations: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long (1862); Hippocrates, Aphorisms, translated by Francis Adams (1849); Pascal, Pensees, translated by W. F. Trotter (1910); Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett (1901).
• India: Rabindranath Tagore's own English books Gitanjali (1912), Stray Birds (1916), Fruit-Gathering (1916) and Fireflies (1928); The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda; Mahatma Gandhi's journal Young India, his Autobiography and dated speeches; statements of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh; the Urdu poetry of Mir, Ghalib, Momin, Zafar and Iqbal, shown in Devanagari script; the Hindi works of Bharatendu Harishchandra, Jaishankar Prasad and Subhadra Kumari Chauhan.

Accuracy

We give each line as it appears in standard editions and name the work, so it can be checked. Editions differ a little in spelling and punctuation, and act and scene numbers in Shakespeare vary slightly. Lines from plays and novels are spoken by characters and do not always show the author's own view. Full texts of most of these works can be read free on Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. If you find a wrong word or a wrong source, please tell us and we will correct or remove it.

What is not here

No living or recent authors, no film dialogues or song lyrics, and no popular lines that cannot be traced to the person they are credited to.

Who makes it

This site is part of ShareYourGroup, a family of free sites about the things people share, send and do together. It is free to use and needs no login. Advertisements pay for the hosting and the work.

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