Where do you find your quotes?
That FAQ gets its own page!
Why did you pull all these quotations together?
I started collecting these things in college, in a “commonplace book” (see History). I’ve always had a fondness for people who express things I believe (or at least find interesting) in language that is meaningful and powerful.
Some people collect coins. Some people collect Pokemon cards. I collect quotations.
Why should I bother with this site when other sites have many more times the quotes?
It’s easy to build big numbers of quotes. Cutting and pasting, or scraping quotation sites, can be done in bulk and can build a huge site.
But Garbage In / Garbage Out. A lot of those bulk sites just throw out the quote and the person they claim said it. The result is a lot of stuff that people didn’t actually say, or that provides no way of finding the context in which they said it.
I touch every single quotation. I look for a citation. I look for an online source. I look for other ways that it might have been said. I provide topic tags to help in finding quotations about a given thing. I try to enrich things beyond just some text and a name, to provide a resource for reference / research.
For some quotes it’s easy — a few minutes. For some, I can spend hours. Others, I simply cannot find the source, and, if I think it’s still a worthwhile piece of text, I’ll label it “(Attributed)”.
What does “(Attributed)” really mean?
It means that folk say that the phrase was expressed by the person credited, but it doesn’t show up in a reliable source, or a primary source from the person being quoted. The label offers a degree of doubt that the person actually said/wrote it (sometimes expanded on in notes on the quote), but also acknowledges that the person often gets the credit.
Other such labels I use (whose meaning is hopefully more clear) are “(Misattributed)” (the quote is attributed to the person but was actually said by someone else) and “(Spurious)” (the quote is attributed to the person but researchers are pretty certain they never said it).
What should I do if I spot an error or incomplete information or a typo on one of your quotes?
Please add a comment on the quotation entry. You can also send an email to dave at wist.info.
I love corrections. I look on WIST as a reference work, and getting corrections makes it all the better. It also shows that people care enough for what I’m doing here to take the time to correct it.
Why do you do parallel translations of non-English quotations?
Because words mean things, and how a thing is translated adds, deducts, and changes meaning. There is no such thing as a definitive translation (though some translations are authorized), and the passage of time also takes the best translations and makes them, in turn, more difficult to read and parse (a 16th Century translation of a 4th Century Latin text is, itself, not easy to understand).
I think the best way to get at what a non-English-writing/speaking person meant is to (a) include the original language used, (b) provide a link to the source so that context can be gleaned, and (c) see how multiple other people translated it to English.
It can be very time-consuming, and often frustrating, but it’s also a lot of fun (for me, at least).
Why do you have so many pro-religion / anti-religion quotes?
Because a lot of people have said interesting or poetic or profound things that both affirm and call into doubt particular religious faiths, or faith in general. And, as such, I also include a lot of pro-tolerance quotes.
As to where I fall on the sentiments of those pro- and anti-religion quotes, it sort of depends on what sort of day I’ve been having and what’s showing up in the news. I also believe that faith and doubt can co-exist.
Why do you use those translations of the Bible?
There are hundreds of Biblical translations to English. Just like parallel translations of any foreign language (in this case Aramaic, ancient Greek, etc.) can provide illumination into what is being said, so parallel Bible verses sometimes provide meaning that a single translation cannot.
I use the King James (KJV) as the version that most English-speakers know because of its pervasiveness in our culture. When quoting from the Apocrypha, I also throw in the Douay-Rheims Catholic translation (DRA), for similar “old-timey” language.
The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is a standard in American Episcopal churches, my current religious home.
At Catechism Class, I studied the New Testament in the Good News Translation (GNT), and loved its way of rephrasing things into modern language (it’s also known as Today’s English Version). I use the Common English Bible (CEB) for similar reasons.
I studied the Bible in college using the Jerusalem Bible (JB), which impressed me with its powerful but non-fancy language. There is “New” Jerusalem Bible (NJB) that loses some of that power, I think, but I continue to include.
Finally, for the Old Testament, I include contemporary translation (the Revised Jewish Publication Society or RJPS ) of the Tanakh (the Jewish name for what Christians call the Old Testament) because — well, those books are originally Jewish scripture, and they deserve a voice at the table.
Why are there so many inconsistencies in formatting, etc.?
I’ve been collecting and writing down this stuff for about forty years (see History). Some of these quotes haven’t been touched since then. As I go along, and revisit and expand on previously quoted authors, etc., I try to apply my current rules for formatting (e.g., date formats in yyyy-mm-dd to allow for easier sorting in some cases) and completion (sourcing materials, comments, topic tags). As I have over 20,000 quotation, this is not something I can just clean up on a whim.
Why do you have a “henoed” tag/topic? What does that mean?
Henoed is Welsh for “old people,” and can be seen on signs in Wales as a warning that old people who may be hard of hearing or visually challenged or just otherwise not on top of their traffic awareness game are in the neighborhood you are driving through.
When my wife and I visited Wales, driving a rental car, whomever was navigating would read street signs phonetically by our American English standards, so this one ended up getting pronounced “hennoyed,” sort of like “annoyed,” which conjured up visions of crochety Welsh elders shaking their canes at all this bothersome traffic.
From there it became my own personal tag for “annoying things about growing old,” a topic I am uncomfortably and increasingly familiar with.