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Nihil est, inquis, quod scribam. At hoc ipsum scribe, nihil esse quod scribas...
You say you have nothing to write about. Well, you can at least write about having nothing to write about...
---Pliny the Younger

I joined the Folio Society for a year a while ago, back when money was a little more plentiful. I found, after the required year's membership was up, that I wasn't enough of a book snob to justify the prices. But the reference set that I got at a steep discount by joining was worth every penny. Dictionaries for everything: world history, phrase and fable, the English language, literature...and this massive quotation dictionary.

Okay, I wasn't thinking too clearly at the time. Or at least, my crystal ball was fritzing. I bet Wikipediahas everything in that reference set packed into one small room on its site.
But leafing through these things, particularly the dictionary of quotations, is such fun. And enlightening. How strange to realize that whatever profound or pithy thought you have was likely first voiced two hundred or two thousand years ago:

Mankind have been created for the sake of one another. Instruct them, therefore, or endure them.
--Marcus Aurelius (some days, I gotta tell you, I find myself sympathetic to ol' Marcus.)

On n'est jamais si malheureuse qu'on croit, ni si heureux qu'on esp`ere.
One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
--Duc de la Rochefoucauld, 1664.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
--Johnathan Swift, 1711. Boy, some things never change.

If you ever get to thinking that somebody described as a nineteenth century evangelist couldn't possibly have anything useful to say, much less on the topic of women's rights, check out this nugget by Sojourner Truth--a woman (and think of what hell it would be to go through life with that moniker today!):

That little man...he says women cna;t have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with Him.

Amen, sister!

Then there are the pithy sayings of more recent vintage, uttered by Canadians:

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
--Leonard Cohen

You fit in to me like a hook into an eye/ A fish hook/ An open eye
--Margaret Atwood (I didn't even have to look that one up: it's been a favourite quote of mine for years.)

I'd love nothing more than to have my name immortalized in a dictionary of quotations. To accomplish this goal, however, I would have to first say something memorable.