I read part of it all the way through.
     -Samuel Goldwyn

This morning when I sat down to eat my egg scramble, I opened the Fourteenth Edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which some of my children thoughtfully gave me last Christmas. As I read some very pithy, humorous or wise sayings, I immediately began to think of how I might use them in a blog post sometime. One after another made me wonder this, and I soon realized that it’s not likely to happen. So I will just share a few random quotes here all at once, out of any context — that is, the context in which they first appeared.

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
     -Georges Braque

This “enlarged edition” I have before me is copyright 1968, so it includes many entries that I never saw in the older edition I owned for a brief while. The very first was published in 1855, and the current version is the 19th, from 2022.

Bartlett said, upon coming out with the 4th Edition, that “…it is not easy to determine in all cases the degree of familiarity that may belong to phrases and sentences which present themselves for admission; for what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another.”

Indeed. I wonder what he would think of the challenge of assembling such a book in this era, when many people have not learned to appreciate the beauty of good writing, nor do they have a collective familiarity with a body of it, as previous generations might have had, as with the Bible or Shakespeare, for example.

Thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.
     -William Shakespeare, Henry IV

John Bartlett began his project when he managed the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachussetts, by writing quotations in a commonplace book. He oversaw the publication of nine editions before his death in 1905. The next editions, in the 20th century, had several different editors, but at first they continued in what was considered the “ideologically inclusive spirit of the first fifteen editions.”

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 Churchill

Hearkening to a tradition that is no more, it is unsurprising that Bartlett’s could not endure as it was, and critics have pointed out the ways in which it has devolved, as the culture from which it draws has fragmented. My public library system has the latest edition, but I don’t plan to borrow it.

This be my pilgrimage and goal,
Daily to march and find
The secret phrases of the soul,
The evangels of the mind.
     -John Drinkwater

My breakfast is long over, and though I would like to keep leafing through Bartlett’s to share more quotes with you, I must go on to other things now. Whatever time of day it is that you are reading this, I hope something here has been a nourishing snack for your own soul.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
     -James Stephens