When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers. – W. H. Auden

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse. – Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, 1948