One would think that a scissors and pastepot collection like this would require little help. Not true. A tribe of hunters and gatherers is required: there is so much to be seen for so little selected. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations

To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones. – Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet

Mr. [Thomas] Gray the poet has often observed to me that if a man were to form a Book of what he had seen and heard himself it must in whatever hands prove a most useful and entertaining one. – Horace Walpole, quoted in Walpoliana, 1800

…the curious hunter-up of rare quotations… the young and struggling scribbler… – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18