There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences. – Miguel de Cervantes

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more. – Winston Churchill, Roving Commission: My Early Life, 1930

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