“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

— Winston S. Churchill

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 9 (Education At Bangalore).

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Winston S. Churchill 601

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965

Thomas William Parsons (1819–1892) American writer

1919
Variant: On a Bust of Dante, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech. I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.”

Minnie Haskins (1875–1957) British poet and sociologist

Her reaction on hearing her poem. Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3561497/At-the-Gate-of-the-Year.html

“People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Source: Prose and Poetry

“He was a learned man, of immense reading, but is much blamed for his unfaithfull quotations.”

John Aubrey book Brief Lives

"William Prynne"
Brief Lives

“Oh, I don't read. I skulk about in search of quotations that might make me appear educated.”

Tasha Alexander (1969) American writer

Source: A Fatal Waltz

“In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 9
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Love Minus Zero/No Limit

“The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted.”

Carl Van Doren (1885–1950) American biographer

As quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1941) by Alice Mary Smyth, p. vii
Context: The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.

“The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Review blurb for the first edition of The Quantum Universe http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521564573 (1987)

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

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