A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”

Proverbs are in the world of thought what gold coin is in the world of business—great value in small compass, and equally current among all people. Sometimes the proverb may be false, the coin counterfeit, but in both cases the false proves the value of the true. – Attributed to D. March in A Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Laconic Quot

I wonder if “an” ever occurs before “haughty” except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like “goeth”? – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. – Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Joh