The chief ingredients which go to make a true proverb are: sense, shortness, and salt. – James Howell, Paroimiografia, 1659

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth…. It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air. – William Gilmore Simms, Egeria: Or, Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods a

To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound. – Christian Nestell Bovee, “Thought,” Institutions and Summaries of Thought, 1862

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991