It should be a pleasure to the appreciative reader, while recognizing their beauty, to cull these flowers of thought for the benefit of those who, less fortunate than himself, have not the time to indulge in literary pleasures. – Maturin M. Ballou, January 1886, preface to Edge-Tools of Speech

Nor must you find fault with me if I often give you what I have borrowed from my various reading, in the very words of the authors themselves. – Macrobius, translated from Latin

In quoting others we cite ourselves. – Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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