I have laboriously collected this cento out of diverse writers. I have wronged no authors but given every man his own.... Bees do little harm and damage no one in extracting honey; I can say of myself, whom have I injured? The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine.... it becomes something different in its new setting.

- Robert Burton

Robert Byrne

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Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth.

- Robert Byrne

Elias Canetti

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The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

- Elias Canetti

Miguel de Cervantes

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A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.

- Miguel de Cervantes

Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort

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Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters: first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.

- Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort

John Jay Chapman

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The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

- John Jay Chapman

Sir Winston Churchill

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It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.... 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

E.M. Cioran

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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

- E.M. Cioran

Marlene Dietrich

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I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

- Marlene Dietrich

Benjamin Disraeli

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All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who can condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character, or illustrates an existence.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers.

- Benjamin Disraeli

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Norman Douglas

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What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings - they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. Nonetheless they embody the concentrated experience of the race.

- Norman Douglas

George Eliot

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In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

- George Eliot

Havelock Ellis

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It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

- Havelock Ellis

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Joseph Farrell

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Epigram and truth are rarely commensurate. Truth has to get somewhat chiseled, as it were, before it will fit into an epigram.

- Joseph Farrell

William Feather

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The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

- William Feather

Anatole France

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When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

- Anatole France

Benjamin Franklin

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I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors.

- Benjamin Franklin

Samuel Goldwyn

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Let's have some new cliches.

- Samuel Goldwyn

Terri Guillemets

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Most collectors collect tangibles. As a quotation collector, I collect wisdom, life, invisible beauty, souls alive in ink.

- Terri Guillemets

Philip G. Hamerton

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Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

- Philip G. Hamerton

Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

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But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

- Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

Aldous Huxley

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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

- Aldous Huxley

Samuel Johnson

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Classical quotation is a parole of literary men all over the world.

- Samuel Johnson

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in few words.

- Samuel Johnson

Franklin P. Jones

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It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

- Franklin P. Jones

Rudyard Kipling

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He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

- Rudyard Kipling

Oscar Levant

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An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played Carnegie Hall.

- Oscar Levant

Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon

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Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

- Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

William Somerset Maugham

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The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

- William Somerset Maugham

Henry Louis Mencken

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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

- Henry Louis Mencken

Michel de Montaigne

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I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

- Michel de Montaigne

Someone might say of me that I have only made a bouquet of other people's flowers here, having supplied nothing of my own but the thread to bind them.

- Michel de Montaigne

Vladimir Nabokov

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There are aphorisms that, like air planes, stay up only while they are in motion.

- Vladimir Nabokov

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away with the centuries, although it serves as food for every speech.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are addressed should be big and tall of stature.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Dorothy Parker

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I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damned things.

- Dorothy Parker

French Proverb

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The maxims of men disclose their hearts.

- French Proverb

Leo Rosten

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Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

- Leo Rosten

Lord John Russell

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A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one.

- Lord John Russell

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

William Shakespeare

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Patch grief with proverbs.

- William Shakespeare

Mark Twain

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It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

- Mark Twain

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

- Mark Twain

Evelyn Waugh

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In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

- Evelyn Waugh

Orson Welles

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Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

- Orson Welles

Virginia Woolf

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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats and one always secretes too much jelly.

- Virginia Woolf