We’re a compulsive but amiable crew, those of us who feel, or have felt, the compulsion to re-record the bright thoughts of other men and women. – Joseph Epstein, “Quotatious,” A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991

He picked something out of everything he read. – Pliny

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth…. It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air. – William Gilmore Simms, Egeria: Or, Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods a

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp… that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages! – William Mathews, “Self-Reliance,” Getting on in the World; Or, Hints on Success