“There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.”

The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)
Context: The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring.
In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.

Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
Interpres.
Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 133 (tr. John Dryden)

To Sir Richard Fanshaw, Upon his Translation of Pastor Fido, line 9.

Source: Signs, Language and Behavior, 1946, p. 238; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 88-89

Robert A. Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

The Law of Mind (1892)
Context: In an article published in The Monist for January, 1891, I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized that of absolute chance. In the number of April, 1892, I argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it will be convenient to christen tychism (from τύχη, chance). A serious student of philosophy will be in no haste to accept or reject this doctrine; but he will see in it one of the chief attitudes which speculative thought may take, feeling that it is not for an individual, nor for an age, to pronounce upon a fundamental question of philosophy. That is a task for a whole era to work out. I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind.

Trinummus, Act II, sc. 2, line 111; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Alternate translation : This is not the best thing possible, nor what I consider proper ; but it is better than the worst. (translator A. H. Evans)
Trinummus (The Three Coins)

Introduction (p. cli)
The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India: an Epic Poem (1776)