Mr. [Thomas] Gray the poet has often observed to me that if a man were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself it must in whatever hands prove a most useful and entertaining one. – Horace Walpole, quoted in Walpoliana, 1800

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson

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

It has been said that death ends all things. This is a mistake. It does not end the volume of practical quotations, and it will not until the sequence of the alphabet is so materially changed as to place D where Z now stands. – Harper’s Bazar: Facetiæ, September 1, 1888, quoted in A Dictionary of