The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
There are two kinds of marriages — where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism — victimless collecting, as it were… in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority… though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our ''white mythology.'' Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
When we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, and opening quotation is a symphony precluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize.
Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.
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