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

The truest sayings are paradoxical. – Laozi, as quoted in The Wisdom of the East: The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ, transla

[W]hen I hear or read a good line I can hardly wait to tell it to somebody else… – Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said,

Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. – Maturin M. Ballou, January 1886, preface to Edge-Tools of Speech