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

The man whose book is filled with quotations, may be said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. – Quoted unattributed in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, April 1