The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities? – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Letters and Social Aims, 1876

It is probably to Talleyrand, that Receiver-General of waif wit and estray epigram, that more sayings have been wrongly attributed than to any other modern. – William Mathews, “Quotation and Misquotation,” in North American Review, January

Nevertheless, a maxim does not necessarily become a proverb. Many grubs never grow to butterflies; and a maxim is only a proverb in its caterpillar stage—a candidate for a wider sphere and longer flight than most are destined to attain. – “Proverbs Secular and Sacred,” The North British Review, February 1858