Pen Vibe

Bringing you Pen and Pencil News, Reviews & Tutorials

  • About
    • Contact Us
    • Submit an Article
    • Pen Vibe Newsletter
  • Guides
  • Tutorials
  • News & Info
  • General Interest
  • Recommended Pens
  • Reviews

10 Favorite Quotes About Pens

By Tony Bridges Leave a Comment | Last Updated March 23, 2020

The other day, I asked a woman at the doctor’s office if I could take a look at her pen. She gave me kind of an odd stare, so I said, “I’ve got a thing about pens.”

It wasn’t the most elegant way to explain my interest in writing instruments. That got me to thinking about how other people have said it. One thing led to another, and I ended up looking at pithy quotes about pens on the internet.

Here are some of the pen quotes that either amused me or seemed to have a particular resonance:

10 Favorite Pen Quotes

Table of Contents

  • 1 Paul Simon
  • 2 Gaston Bachelard
  • 3 George Denison Prentice
  • 4 Graham Greene
  • 6 Mitch Hedberg
  • 7 Voltaire
  • 8 Thomas Jefferson
  • 9 Billy Collins
  • 10 Oscar Neimeyer
  • 11 Petrarch

Paul Simon

1. You want to be a writer, but you don’t know how or when. Find a quiet place; use a humble pen.

Lyrics to the song Hurricane Eye by Paul Simon from the 2000 studio album You’re the One.

Paul Simon

Gaston Bachelard

2. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Gaston Bachelard, another French philosopher and writer, in his 1960 work The Poetics of Reverie, which examined the expansiveness of language and imagination.

Gaston Bachelard

George Denison Prentice

3. The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

Quoted from Prenticeana: Or, Wit and Humor in Paragraphs by George Denison Prentice. Prentice, editor of the Louisville (Kentucky) Journal in the mid 19th century, learned his own lesson the hard way. History has not looked kindly on his more xenophobic writing.

George Denison Prentice

Graham Greene

4. My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Graham Greene gave this quote about pens in an interview with the International Herald Tribune in 1977. Greene was an English novelist who wrote more than two dozen books, including The Third Man and The Quiet American.

Graham Greene

Mitch Hedberg

5. I bought a $7 pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.

A joke from Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up routine. He was known for never going anywhere without his pen and notebook. Hedberg even wrote a fan letter to Uniball and asked about the possibility of sponsorship.

Mitch Hedberg

Voltaire

6. To hold a pen is to be at war.

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote this in 1748 to Jeanne-Grâce Bosc du Bouchet, wife of a childhood friend. He also wrote basically the same thing to Marie Mignot, his niece, a few years later.

Voltaire

Thomas Jefferson

7. Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword: shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man…

Thomas Jefferson wrote this in 1792 in a fan letter of his own to Thomas Paine, the well-known pamphleteer and author of Common Sense. A variant of the “pen is mightier than the sword” idea, except that Jefferson wrote it 40 years before Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s famous line.

thomas jefferson

Billy Collins

8. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, had this to say in a 2001 interview with George Plimpton in the Paris Review.

Billy Collins

 

Oscar Neimeyer

9. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

Brazilian master architect Oscar Neimeyer, a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and a master of modern design, explained himself succinctly in a 2007 interview with the Guardian.

Oscar Neimeyer

Petrarch

10. There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away — sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come.

This is my personal favorite of the quotes about pens. It was written by 14th-century Italian scholar Petrarch in a letter to his friend Giovanni Boccaccio.

Petrarch

Filed Under: General Interest Tagged With: pen quotes


Keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our reviews and comparisons. We try to keep things fair and balanced to help you make the best choices.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

19 − four =

Guides

  1. Black or Blue Ink?
  2. Ballpoint Rollerball or Gel Pen?
  3. Best Fineliners to Use with Copic Markers
  4. Best Pens For Exams
  5. Best Pens for Left-Handed Writers
  6. First Time Buyers Guide to Fountain Pens
  7. How Do You Recycle Ink Pens
  8. How to Get Ink Stains Out of Clothes
  9. How to start Writing A Journal
  10. Complete Guide to Erasable Pens

News & Info

  1. 10 Best Fountain Pens Under £20.00
  2. 10 Great Pen Quotes
  3. 5 Popular Drafting & Mechanical Pencils
  4. 6 Mechanical Pencils For Children
  5. Can You Get Ink Poisoning from A Pen?
  6. Can You Get Lead Poisoning From A Pencil?
  7. Green Ink The Colour of Spooks & Eccentrics
  8. How Far Will A Ballpoint Write?
  9. Adventures in Stationery

Recent Posts

  • How Long is a Pen?
  • The 10 Best Pencils for Kindergarteners
  • The Biggest Pencils in The World
  • Dixon Ticonderoga Pencils – A Comprehensive Guide
  • Wooden Pencils Vs Mechanical Pencils

Sign Up for the Latest News

loader

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Info

  • About
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy

More

  • Affiliate Disclosure
  • Submit an Article
  • Pen Finder

Copyright © 2021 Pen Vibe