But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1923, quoted in Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspond

Besides, it happens (how, I cannot tell) that an idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation… – Desiderius Erasmus, Adages

There is a homely directness about these rustic apothegms which makes them far more palatable than the strained and sophisticated epigrams of the characters of Oscar Wilde’s plays, who are ever striving strenuously to dazzle us with verbal pyrotechnics. – Brander Matthews, “American Aphorisms,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1915,