The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. – Edwin P. Whipple, lecture delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Associa

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse. – Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, 1948

They are the abridgments of wisdom. – Sumner Ellis, Hints on Preaching: A Cloud of Witnesses, 1879