The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago…. I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking. – Henry G. Bohn, A Dictionary of Quotations from the English Poets, 1881

Attend to me, Sancho, I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and seasonably applied; but to be for ever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar. – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated from Spanish

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use. – Attributed to George Eliot in Sayings: Proverbs, Maxims, Mottoes by Charles F. S

Miss Amesbury is especially happy in the use of quotations—and an apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence. – L.E. Landon, Romance and Reality, 1832