A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”

Ralph Keyes calls quotation collectors “quotographers,” the men and women who gather catchwords, watchwords, war words, winged words, maxims, mottos, sayings, and quips into books of a thousand pages. Through the centuries quotation collectors have saved quotations that would otherwise be lost. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

A vast meaning is unfolded in each line, with such power that a sentence only a line long would suffice for a whole life’s training. – Rufinus (translated from Latin), about The Sentences of Sextus