There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences. – Miguel de Cervantes

You serve me a slice of raw beef, Heliodorus, and pour me out three cups of wine rawer than the beef, and then you wash me out at once with epigrams. – Lucilius, in The Greek Anthology, Volume IV, “Book XI: The Convivial and Satiric

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. – Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page. – Ralph Waldo Emerson