[T]hinking, thinking, remembering, biding her time, uttering extensive dreamy theories and troubling witticisms, with an occasional incorrectness of folk-songs in her speech. – Glenway Wescott, December 1929 [Referring to Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881&ndash

He who trains his tongue to quote the learned sages will be known, far and wide, as a smart-ass. – Howard Kandel, The Power of Positive Pessimism: Proverbs for Our Times, 1964

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. – Edward Lytton Bulwer