When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

A lot of the beliefs we have are based on exaggeration, misconception and opinions imposed on us by other people.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

Ever day someone somewhere in the world is quoting me.

if we don’t direct our own thoughts, we’ll fall under the influence of those who would condition us to behave in the way they desire.

We take greater pains to persuade others that we are happy than in endeavoring to think so ourselves

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.

It is good to know something of the customs of different people in order to judge more soundly of our own, and so that we might not think that all that which is contrary to our own ways be ridiculous and contrary to reason, as those who have seen nothing have the habit of doing.