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

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it. – Anatole France, “The Creed”

Whoever reads only to transcribe or quote shining remarks without entering into the genius and spirit of the author, will be apt to be misled out of a regular way of thinking, and the product of all this will be found to be a manifest incoherent piece of patchwork. – Attributed to Swift in A Dictionary of Thoughts, Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Q