The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago…. I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking. – Henry G. Bohn, A Dictionary of Quotations from the English Poets, 1881

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

No claim is made here for scholarship, or for the earliest use of a quote or even, in some cases, the precise wording…. No matter: in my opinion, they are in this form graceful, compact and cogent. – R.I. Fitzhenry, preface to The David & Charles Book of Quotations, September 198

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own. – James Russell Lowell