Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities? – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come. – W.I.E. Gates, quoted in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times by Laurenc

An epigram is a gag that’s played Carnegie Hall. – Oscar Levant (Thanks, Garson O’Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)

Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters; first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything. – Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort