Samuel Laman Blanchard

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 …

Of Shakespeare, not a line but has been repeatedly, and will continue to be cited, as a commentary on the great and various volume of human nature.

Pope abounds in quotable things, chiefly from his habit of making every line rest on its own merits—a circumstance that accounts, in its turn, for the strong resemblance his couplets bear to each other.

remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own—that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost …

who cites as it were the very language of our dreams

the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author

if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up

to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.

we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way

quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish

amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events

How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a periodical... is requoted in every book that comes out during the next three months, and "sleeps again!"

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? Who ever skipped a quotation, though it made against the interest of the story? Besides, …

No prime-minister in the parliament of letters has, at any time, ventured to introduce a bill for the apprehension of all vagrant inverted commas that may be found trespassing in the sunny places of argument; and to restrain the poaching …

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, …

Everybody is seldom to be believed. "They say" is not proof that they know. On dit is French for a fib.

When the error is universal, it is supposed to end. The adoption of the foundling establishes its consanguinity.

The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits; if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last "everybody says so," and then it is undeniable.

As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not."

Credulity lives next door to Gossip.

it goes round, until the first projector hardly recognizes his own lie; and ends by believing ten times more absurdity than he had palmed upon others.

never fails for want of vouchers.

call any man out who ventures to dispute its authenticity.

But give him a fable fresh from the mint of the Mendacity Society