Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor. – James Ellis, quoted in Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopædia of Prose Quota

…the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind. – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18

To be amused by what you read — that is the great spring of happy quotations. – C.E. Montague (1867–1928), “Quotation”