Take my advice, dear reader, don’t talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram. – Joseph Farrell, “About Conversation,” The Lectures of a Certain Professor, 1877

You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space. – Attributed to Beecher in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899

An inveterate quote plucker is what I have become. – Elaine Bernstein Partnow, preface to The Quotable Woman: From Eve to 1799, 1985

That part of a work of one author found in another is not of itself piracy, or sufficient to support an action; a man may adopt part of the work of another; he may so make use of another’s labors for the promotion of science and the benefit of the public. – Lord Ellenborough, quoted in Bouvier’s Law Dictionary by John Bouvier, 8th