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

Quotation brings to many people one of the intensest joys of living…. This innocent vanity often helps us over the hard places in life; it gives us a warm little glow against the coldness of the world and keeps us snug and happy. – Bernard Darwin, May 1941, introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads…. – Joseph Epstein, Foreword to Fred R. Shapiro’s Yale Book of Quotations, 200