An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. – Edwin P. Whipple, lecture delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Associa

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. – Edward Lytton Bulwer

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art”