It’s amazing how much funny stuff there is…. [A] river of rich comedic milk is flowing across the land, and as fast as I skim off the cream more cream appears…. I may be doomed to wade around forever in other people’s pith. Not that it’s such a bad life. – Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said,

A case which commonly happens with us in London, as well as our Neighbours in Paris, where if a Witty Man starts a happy thought, a Million of sordid Imitators ride it to death. – Thomas Brown, Laconics: Or, New Maxims of State and Conversation

It has been said that death ends all things. This is a mistake. It does not end the volume of practical quotations, and it will not until the sequence of the alphabet is so materially changed as to place D where Z now stands. – Harper’s Bazar: Facetiæ, September 1, 1888, quoted in A Dictionary of

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive… – Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia, 1512, translated