The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art”

There are plenty of good maxims in the world; we fail only in applying them. – Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), translated from the French by an unnamed transl

…I didn’t do anything that can properly be called research; rather, I proceeded by the methodless method of “determined browsing”— – Rudolf Flesch, on collecting excerpts for The Book of Unusual Quotations, 1957

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come. – W.I.E. Gates, quoted in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times by Laurenc