The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago…. I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking. – Henry G. Bohn, A Dictionary of Quotations from the English Poets, 1881

For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I don’t mind citing a bad author if the line is good. – Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” translated by Moses Hadas

Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come. – W.I.E. Gates, quoted in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times by Laurenc