Quotes from Gary Saul Morson

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives.

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"?

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them.

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations.

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

We sometimes think of quotations as extracts from larger texts, but some quotations originated complete unto themselves.

If one has ever wondered how an entire nation could have followed a murderous leader, one needs to understand that it doesn't take that many people actually believing what the leader says. They just need to be willing to repeat whatever their side is saying.

Like a delicatessen owner who sells rancid meat and then blames his business failure on the vulgarization of customer taste, humanities professors account for their plight by faulting their students. "All they care about is money." "Twitter

This is what we call political fundamentalism: a vision of the political world in which all goodness and truth lie on one side.

Unanimity testifies to thoughtlessness, because in politics there are always arguments on both sides... political judgement should not be reflexive but deliberative.

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.