Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters; first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything. – Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

It sometimes happens at the end of a dinner, when jokes and walnuts are cracked together, that the paternity of some trite quotation is put in question, and at once the wit of the whole company is set wool-gathering. – Frederic Swartwout Cozzens, “Phrases and Filberts,” Sayings, Wise and Otherwise

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”