The Pan Dictionary of Famous Quotations [antikvár]

IntroductionThe Pan Dictionary of Famous Quotations has been planned as a useful and comprehensive work of reference and also as a book which I hope will give pleasure to readers who use it as an anthology. The selection of entries, as well as the arrangement in single rather than double column, is intended to encourage the browser in addition to anyone looking up specific quotations. The number of quotations selected from an author is not, of course, any indication of the author's popularity or literary merit. Some authors, like Pope and Wilde, wrote in an epigrammatic form which lends itself well to quotation; by comparison few novelists, apart from Dickens, have this particular quality. The criterion in selection is what is likely to be familiar to the general reader whose mother tongue is English. A few quotations are included from French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin and Spanish sources which seem likely to be known to many readers and in all such cases a translation is given. As well as quotations over one thousand proverbs are included. Often one does not know whether a familiar phrase is proverbial or whether it has a specific literary origin. Because of this it seemed helpful to include the best-known proverbs.It is often extremely difficult to assess the degree of familiarity of quotations and this is particularly true when considering what to include from writing and speech of recent years. Which of the following, for example, are likely to be remembered in the year 2000?4One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'.*Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, 21 July1969