To be amused by what you read — that is the great spring of happy quotations. – C.E. Montague (1867–1928), “Quotation”

People will accept your idea more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first. – David H. Comins, quoted in The Washingtonian, Volume14, 1978

Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. – Maturin M. Ballou, January 1886, preface to Edge-Tools of Speech

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