Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? ou

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

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Attend to me, Sancho, I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and seasonably applied; but to be for ever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar. – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated from Spanish

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Short isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient Wisdom delighted to convey its precepts, for the regulation of life and manners. – William Warburton, “Sermon IV”

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Quotations

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

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Quotations

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue. – Isaac D’Israeli, “Quotation,” A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature

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