Great quotation collections glean the millennia, distill essences, and battle for bragging rights about who’s bigger, who’s smarter, who’s best. Who-knows-who-said-what has a market, a history, and a hall of fame. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

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

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them. – Gary Saul Morson, “Bakhtin, The Genres of Quotation, and The Aphoristic Consciou

When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876