You complain, Velox, that the epigrams which I write are long. You yourself write nothing; your attempts are shorter. – Marcus Valerius Martialis, translated from Latin

Great quotation collections glean the millennia, distill essences, and battle for bragging rights about who’s bigger, who’s smarter, who’s best. Who-knows-who-said-what has a market, a history, and a hall of fame. – Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010

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

The more an idea is developed, the more concise becomes its expression: the more a tree is pruned, the better is the fruit. – Alfred Bougeart, quoted in A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedn