Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads…. – Joseph Epstein, Foreword to Fred R. Shapiro’s Yale Book of Quotations, 200

Collections of gnomes, adages, sayings, and parables have been made from times immemorial in all countries and in all languages possessing some kind of literature. – E.H. Michelsen, A Manual of Quotations from the Ancient, Modern, and Oriental La

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

The short sayings of the wise and good men are of great value, like the dust of gold, or the sparks of diamonds. – Attributed to Tillotson in A Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Laconic Quo