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

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember. – John Mason Brown

The man whose book is filled with quotations, may be said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. – Quoted unattributed in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, April 1