The truest sayings are paradoxical. – Laozi, as quoted in The Wisdom of the East: The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ, transla

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors… – Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, 1716 (Part the Second, sect. ii)

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”