Where do infamous quotes come from?

[flobadob]

I've read a lot of very moving and persuasive quotes from websites over the years, attributed to many different authors. What I was wondering is from where do these quotes arise? Are they taken from writings from years ago? Are they taken out of books? Are they relayed orally over time? How do they become part of everyday language?

[NoMercy]

Btw... The "pacific" is a vast expanse of salt water between Australia and America, and is typically referred to as an "ocean."

;-)

[fredpuli47]

Yes, the Pacific was so called because it was pacific, meaning peaceful,compared to other oceans and seas.

On the topic,'all of the above' is the answer. And some quotations get attributed because they are the sort of thing that the 'person' might have said but didn't (Holmes' " Elementary, my dear Watson" or Churchill's "that is the kind of English up with which I will not put"). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations gives only 18 quotations from Plato. He gets cited a lot more than that and it may well be that some of his 'quotations' were not by him.Confucius gets only 29 in the ODQ and we all know that Confucius, he say...LOL

And what gets repeated may not be accurately ascribed ;no Roman emperor ever said of the people "Let them hate me provided that they also fear me" (it's from a grotesquely cruel character in a play); or accurately quoted (" Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" should be "Power tends to corrupt etc")

[eco123]

Worry is a total waste of time. It doesn’t change anything. All it does is steal your joy and keep you very busy doing nothing.

ref- http://www.quotesnsayings.net/quotes/80312