[T]here are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. – Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, 1963, translated from Russian by Michael Scammell

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson

As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me… – Michel de Montaigne, “Of Phisiognomy,” translated by John Florio; commonly moder

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011