A good friend of mine — let’s call him Bartlett — can instantly recall hundreds of famous quotations. Whether our discussion turns to Groucho Marx or Karl Marx, Marilyn Monroe or the Monroe Doctrine, my friend Bartlett always seems to have an apt quotation ready.

For those of us with weaker synapses comes a cool app called Wisdom Quotes. Offered by Xim Inc. of San Francisco, it is a mobile library of some 3,000 quotations from 70 authors, political figures, scientists, philosophers and others, ranging from Confucius, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius to Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher. Quotations can be searched by either author or topic; the latter include such disparate categories as Animals, Role Models and Fools. In other words, there’s something for everyone.

What I like best about Wisdom Quote is its clean, polished and easy-to-navigate look and feel. The developers adopted a scuffed leather look that reminds me, pleasantly, of old books. Here, for example, is the start or menu page:

Quote of the Day randomly selects and displays a quote. Start From the Beginning presents a quote sequence that starts, for reasons I don’t understand, with a George Bernard Shaw quote about living in a restless age. Resume the Last Slide does just that. Favorites (indicated by a star icon) brings you to a list of quotes you’ve marked as, well, your favorites. And from any inner page, pressing Menu brings you back to the start page.

Categories, indicated by a flowchart icon, lets you search by either Author or Categories, the latter being the app’s somewhat confusing designation for topics. Here’s a look at each:

There are two ways to search these lists. Either use the two buttons at the bottom of the screen to scroll up or down the list. Or press the magnifying glass icon to start a text search. In a text search, tap on the text field and a virtual keyboard appears. Here, I’m about to search on Animals:

And here is the first result of my Animals search:

For an author search, you needn’t to type the person’s full name, so long as you spell either their first or last name correctly. For example, searching on either ‘Mark’ or ‘Twain’ gets this result:

Click on an author’s thumbnail portrait, and you can select either About the Author or All His Quotes. (It’s always ‘His’, by the way, even for Anais Nin and Dorothy Parker.) There’s also an experimental SMS message feature that lets you send quotations as text messages to individuals or groups in your device’s phone book.

Glitches, I’ve known a few. On my Nokia N97, the app ran in portrait mode only, never in landscape mode. Also, the About the Author feature, which opens a web browser and displays the author’s Wikipedia entry, consistently crashed and froze the app when I returned from the web to the app.

Purists may chafe at the lack of citations, too. While a terse description is provided for each author (Balzac, for example, is labeled ‘novelist & playwright’), there are no citations for any of the quotes. Where are the quotes from? Are they accurate? Only Google knows.

On the plus side, Wisdom Quotes’ touch-screen UI worked smoothly and flawlessly. Finger swipes worked too, letting me scroll up and down, or left and right, though the various lists.

The Wisdom Quotes app is easy on your device memory at about half a megabyte. And it costs just 99 cents in Ovi Store. That works out to roughly 30 quotations for a penny – not a bad price for keeping up with the Bartletts.