It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more. – Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: My Early Life, 1930

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art”

The lips of the wise are as the doors of a cabinet; no sooner are they opened, but treasures are poured out before thee. Like unto trees of gold arranged in beds of silver, are wise sentences uttered in due season. – The Economy of Human Life, Translated from an Indian Manuscript, Written by an A

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom. – Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011