Quotations

I can tell thee where that saying was born… – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night [I, 5, Maria]

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? – Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, 1873

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning. – Samuel Johnson, 1760

It sometimes happens at the end of a dinner, when jokes and walnuts are cracked together, that the paternity of some trite quotation is put in question, and at once the wit of the whole company is set wool-gathering. – Frederic Swartwout Cozzens, “Phrases and Filberts,” Sayings, Wise and Otherwise

The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen. – Lemony Snicket, The Vile Village, 2001

Life itself is a quotation. – Jorge Luis Borges

A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue. – Attributed to William F. DeVault

For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ralph Keyes calls quotation collectors “quotographers,” the men and women who gather catchwords, watchwords, war words, winged words, maxims, mottos, sayings, and quips into books of a thousand pages. Through the centuries quotation collectors have saved quotations that would otherwise be lost. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

Quotology disdains no quotations whatsoever, a duty it bears stoutly, with bloodshot eyes and sagging shelves. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. – Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors. – Benjamin Franklin, “Preface,” Poor Richard Improved, wording verified by Respect

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. – Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Joh

There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation. – James Boswell, “The Hypochondriack,” No.XXII, 1779

Quotation is more universal and more ancient than one would perhaps believe. – James Boswell, “The Hypochondriack,” No.XXI, The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman&