In these circumstances I think we must take the bull by the horns… and, making due allowances, quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing. – Clifton Fadiman, c.1955

Great quotation collections glean the millennia, distill essences, and battle for bragging rights about who’s bigger, who’s smarter, who’s best. Who-knows-who-said-what has a market, a history, and a hall of fame. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago…. I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking. – Henry G. Bohn, A Dictionary of Quotations from the English Poets, 1881

There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it. – Richard Chenevix Trench, Proverbs and Their Lessons, 1905

Most of the noted literary men have indulged in the prudent habit of selecting favorite passages for future reference. – Charles F. Schutz, Sayings: Proverbs, Maxims, Mottoes, 1915