We’re a compulsive but amiable crew, those of us who feel, or have felt, the compulsion to re-record the bright thoughts of other men and women. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. – Edward Lytton Bulwer

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876