"Horace ou Despréaux l’a dit avant vous.—Je le crois sur votre parole; mais je l’ai dit comme mien. Ne puis-je pas penser après eux une chose vraie, et que d’autres encore penseront après moi?"

"At all times pseudoprofound aphorisms have been more popular than rigorous arguments."

"To copy beauties, forfeits all pretence To fame—to copy faults, is want of sense."

"All which he understood by rote, And, as occasion serv'd, would quote."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."

"I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture..."

"A great thought is a great boon, for which God is to be the first thanked, then he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the man who is the first to quote it to us."

"Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation."

"Quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal."

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's 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."

"Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?"

"It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul."

"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands."

"There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent."

"Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated."

"The man whose book is filled with quotations, has been said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. I would rather defend such authors by a different allusion, and ask whether honey is the worse for being gathered from many flowers."

"In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments."

"One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote—Alexander Pope."

"Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books: else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not."

"To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it."

"Like your body, your mind also gets tired, so refresh it by wise sayings."

"Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the trite passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations."

"It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite."

"The Rules of Misquotation:"

"Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent and power."

"Its fall is entirely owing to itself, the seeds of death were in it from the commencement. The powers of satire and of derision, which it exercised with as little mercy as modesty, have proved, in the result, very humble powers; and after usurping an authority, the most dictatorial and audacious, a general doubt is now expressed as to the ability with which it was at one time supposed to have been conducted. Of this there certainly can be no dispute that it will be difficult to name as many volumes in the English language which afford so few quotable passages; and perhaps there can be no better proof of the original mediocrity of the contributors, whatever may have been the merit of a few occasional articles."

"There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it."

"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be."

"Fine by defect, and delicately weak."

"Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it."

"That air and harmony of shape express, Fine by degrees, and beautifully less."

"People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything."

"It is the Lord’s work, and when we are on the Lord’s errand, we are entitled to the Lord’s help. Remember that whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies."

"Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising in the world."

"Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality."

"Hard as a piece of the nether millstone."

"It is the quality of reason to be invariable and constant; and of equity, to give to one man what, in the same case, is given to another."

"The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved."

"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?"

"One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect."

"Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can't measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality."

"Come, give us a taste of your quality."

"Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives."

"Quality means meeting customers' (agreed) requirements, formal and informal, at lowest cost, first time every time."

"It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected."

"It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports."

"Quality means no mistakes. That's a very interesting point. ... perfectionism ..."

"The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say."