How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a per — Samuel Laman Blanchard

"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."

"Two hats, we grant, may be better than one; yet is one enough at a time. It is so with the head. It should be sole and self-relying. We like to wear ours in single blessedness on our own shoulders, and not let it hanker after a place on other peoples."

"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."

"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 friends voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example."

"It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Miltons fish, "Show to the sun their wavd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Natures green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction."