Nor must you find fault with me if I often give you what I have borrowed from my various reading, in the very words of the authors themselves. – Macrobius, translated from Latin

Whoever reads only to transcribe or quote shining remarks without entering into the genius and spirit of the author, will be apt to be misled out of a regular way of thinking, and the product of all this will be found to be a manifest incoherent piece of patchwork. – Attributed to Swift in A Dictionary of Thoughts, Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Q

To be amused by what you read — that is the great spring of happy quotations. – C.E. Montague (1867–1928), “Quotation”