Good quotations, like good thoughts, are true wealth. – Annie E. Lancaster, quoted in Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopædia of Pros

The man whose book is filled with quotations, may be said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. – Quoted unattributed in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, April 1

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

Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize. – Isaac D’Israeli, “Quotation,” A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature