Quotations

…have the same Use with Burning-Glasses, to collect the diffus’d Rays of Wit and Learning in Authors, and make them point with Warmth and Quickness upon the Reader’s Imagination. – Jonathan Swift, “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet: Together With a Proposal fo

Idly curious race of grammarians, ye who dig up by the roots the poetry of others; unhappy bookworms that walk on thorns, defilers of the great… away with you, bugs that bite secretly the eloquent. – Antiphanes of Macedonia, in The Greek Anthology, Volume IV, “Book XI: The Conviv

You serve me a slice of raw beef, Heliodorus, and pour me out three cups of wine rawer than the beef, and then you wash me out at once with epigrams. – Lucilius, in The Greek Anthology, Volume IV, “Book XI: The Convivial and Satiric

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it. – John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 24, 1819

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

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words. – E.M. Cioran, “Atrophy of Utterance,” All Gall Is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms,

Quotations cause all kinds of trouble. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

The difference between my quotations and those of the next man is that I leave out the inverted commas. – George Moore, quoted in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times by Laurenc

What a good thing Adam had — when he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before. – Mark Twain, 1867

How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things. – Dorothy Parker, Here Lies, 1939

Quotation lovers love rare words. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

I don’t mind citing a bad author if the line is good. – Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” translated by Moses Hadas

I doubt whether Cromwell or Milton could have rivaled [William Lloyd] Garrison in this field of quotation; and the power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge. – John Jay Chapman

[T]he governess… looked upon him [Mr. Swiveller] as a literary gentleman of eccentric habits, and of a most prodigious talent in quotation. – Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature. – Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), “Of Reading and Writing,” Thus Spake Zara

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

One man’s wit, and all men’s wisdom. – John Russell, definition of a proverb

Seek not to know who said this or that, but take note of what has been said. – Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated from Latin