For I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase… – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartletts 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. – Sir Winston Churchill

I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation. – Joseph Addison, Spectator, No.464

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world. – G.K. Chesterton, “On Writing Badly”