Some time ago I was asked to create a “Quote of the Day” webpart for Sharepoint. I wanted to style it in a particular way, so rather than use some of the give-away options I thought I’d create my own.

There are numerous Quote of the Day sites but I wanted to house the solution totally in-house – so decided to back the webpart against a Sharepoint List.

However when I went looking for a good list of Quotes, I struggled to (a) find a big free list and (b) any I did find seemed to have poor content. So to get the job done I manually hacked away, but I thought to myself that I would figure out a way to gather my own list.

So I wrote an app on one of my public servers that went off and scoured the internet sourcing Quotes of the Day, and let it sit there for a few couple of months.

Tens of thousands of requests later I now present you a free list of 3750 unique Quotes of the Day from over 650 authors.

The list contains quotes from people such as Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen King, John F. Kennedy, Woody Allen, Winston Churchill to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

It contains such pearls as Socrates

An unexamined life is not worth living.

to Chief Wiggum’s

Put out an APB for a male suspect, driving a… car of some sort, heading in the direction of, uh, you know, that place that sells chili. Suspect is hatless. Repeat, hatless.

eg Woody Allen’s

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.

My original list also contains a scrape of the Wikipedia article for each author, for which I present the first two or so paragraphs as a tooltip when hovering over the Quote of the Day – if people are interested in that full list I’ll pop that up as well.

For now this free list is available either in HTML or Excel format – hope it saves someone some time!!