The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art”

Dr. Richard Bentley (1662-1742)… is said one day, on finding his son reading a novel, to have remarked—’Why read a book that you cannot quote?’— a saying which affords an amusing illustration of the nature and object of his literary studies. – Cyclopædia of English Literature edited by Robert Chambers, 1844

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving… – William Francis Henry King, “Introduction,” Classical and Foreign Quotations, 18

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric. – Christian Nestell Bovee, Intuitions and Summaries of Thought: Vol.II, 1862