Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others. – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Authorship and Style,” translated from German by Mrs. R

Take my advice, dear reader, don’t talk epigrams even if you have the gift. I know, to those have, the temptation is almost irresistible. But resist it. Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to be somewhat chiselled, as it were, before it will quite fit into an epigram. – Joseph Farrell, “About Conversation,” The Lectures of a Certain Professor, 1877

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not. – Attributed to Emerson in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1886