"Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink."
Ink quotes
165 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ink — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."
"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."
"Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results"
"The machine has several virtues... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around."
"Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs."
"A small drop of ink makes thousands, perhaps millions... think."
"When malice is joined to envy, there is given forth poisonous and feculent matter, as ink from the cuttle-fish."
"He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink."
"A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink."
"The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink."
"He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink."
"Don't write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn't be changed."
"How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?"
"Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink."
"I am a galley slave to pen and ink."
"The strongest memory is not as strong as the weakest ink."
"Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter."
"I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood."
"Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink."
"Ink is the great cure for all human ills."