You can quote me on that

"You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!" So in 1878 Mr Burgon quoted Martin Joseph Routh, in a memoir of Dr Routh in the Quarterly Review.

The only reason I know this is that yesterday I was quoting my old French teacher's injunction always to verify my references, and I wondered afterwards who had first said this, and I looked it up last night, and now I know.

Or to put it another way, I now haven't the faintest idea. I have no idea who Dr Routh was and even less idea who Mr Burgon was, and I haven't the least desire to know who they were, so it was a waste of time (in this instance) to verify my references, as they seem meaningless.

I'm not sure how useful it is to know the source of this or any other quotation. For years I have been wondering who said "Vive la diffrence!", without ever meeting a book or person who could tell me. I dimly recall once reading that it was Anatole France or some other semi-forgotten giant of French letters, who was sat at dinner a hundred years ago next to some New Woman of the age. She said to him: "You must admit that nowadays there is very little difference between men and women any more!" He replied graciously: "Vive la diffrence!"

But was it old Anatole? And if the source of this quotation were suddenly authenticated for me, would it help at all? What gain would it be for me to know that it had actually been said by Alphonse Karr or Sainte- Beuve or Lucien Guitry or Oscar Wilde or the Prince of Wales over for a dirty weekend with a good scriptwriter?

Two entries up from Dr "Verify-Your-References" Routh in my Ox Dict of Quotes, there is an entry for Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. Anyone know who he was and what he wrote? No? Nor did I. Here are the first two lines of what he wrote:

Allons, enfants de la patrie

Le jour de gloire est arriv.

Yes, at last, the name of the writer of the Marseillaise has swum into my ken and my life has already remained completely unaltered. Still, the one good thing about verifying your references is that it gradually turns into browsing, and you start discovering new things instead of checking up on old ones. I came across two excellent reflections on life in Jonathon Green's Says Who? - a fine (like all Green's works) survey of modern sayings and catchphrases. Here's one:

"We must believe in luck. How else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"

Here's the other:

"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us."

One is from the French composer Erik Satie, the other from Quentin Crisp. You should be able to tell which is which, if only because the first one has the slight smell of translation. An English-speaker would not, probably, say, "We must believe in luck." Much more likely to say, "We must believe in the existence of luck," or "We have to believe that luck exists." Anyway, that is Satie and the other one is Crisp, and no doubt these things sound better in French.

Well, they do sound better. There is no doubt. Take the French saying, whose source I do not know: "Partir, c'est mourir un peu."

A great phrase, that. There is no exact pithy version in English. "To part is to die a little"? No. Cole Porter did a good version in "Every time we say goodbye, I die a little", but it's twice as long. Shakespeare did nicely with "Parting is such sweet sorrow" - nicely enough to win the approval of Duke Ellington, who named his Shakespearean suite of 1956 Such Sweet Sorrow.

Incidentally, my wife has come up with an interesting theory that some famous quotes are due to mishearings or misunderstandings. Jonathon Green says that the phrase "a phoney war" was coined by the French leader Edouard Daladier in 1939, when he described the stalemate between Germany and France as "une drle de guerre". This was then translated and remembered as "a phoney war". Unfortunately, "une drle de guerre" does not mean "a phoney war". It means "a funny kind of a war" or "a funny old war".

My wife thinks that a conversation must have taken place along these lines:

Daladier: Oui, c'est une drle de guerre!

Churchill: What's he say?

French aide: Monsieur, 'e ees saying zat eet ees a ferny war.

Churchill: A phoney war? Yes, quite apt, actually. I must make a note of that ...

I think she's right. And if she isn't, it's impossible to disprove.