The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. – Attributed to W. Somerset Maugham

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

A true quotation cannot be divorced from the character who uttered or scribbled it; it should say as much about the person quoted as about the particular subject referred to, and for this reason an anthology of quotations should be a kind of portrait gallery. – Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, “Introduction”

One of the great attractions of quotations is that they are rich in ideas which can be tailored to specific purposes. – Robert Irvine Fitzhenry (1918–2008), The Harper Book of Quotations