Life itself is a quotation. – Jorge Luis Borges

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

Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world. – Arthur Helps, “Chapter IV,” Companions of My Solitude, 1851

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it… – George Santayana, “Chapter VIII: Prerational Morality,” The Life of Reason: Volu

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011