…have the same Use with Burning-Glasses, to collect the diffus’d Rays of Wit and Learning in Authors, and make them point with Warmth and Quickness upon the Reader’s Imagination. – Jonathan Swift, “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet: Together With a Proposal fo

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels. – Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927)

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as quoted in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal and The

Well, a lot of people go to Shakespeare to recognize the quotations. – James Aswell, 1936 [Popularized in 1949 by Evan Esar as “Now we sit through Shak