It’s amazing how much funny stuff there is…. [A] river of rich comedic milk is flowing across the land, and as fast as I skim off the cream more cream appears…. I may be doomed to wade around forever in other people’s pith. Not that it’s such a bad life. – Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said,

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

You complain, Velox, that the epigrams which I write are long. You yourself write nothing; your attempts are shorter. – Marcus Valerius Martialis, translated from Latin

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving… – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18