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

Dr. Richard Bentley (1662-1742)… is said one day, on finding his son reading a novel, to have remarked—’Why read a book that you cannot quote?’— a saying which affords an amusing illustration of the nature and object of his literary studies. – Cyclopædia of English Literature edited by Robert Chambers, 1844

No claim is made here for scholarship, or for the earliest use of a quote or even, in some cases, the precise wording…. No matter: in my opinion, they are in this form graceful, compact and cogent. – R.I. Fitzhenry, preface to The David & Charles Book of Quotations, September 198

In phrases as brief as a breath worldly wisdom concentrates. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010