A kissing cousin of good quotations are proverbs. They are the distilled wisdom of all nations. Many are humorous and all are memorable. Each of you probably would define what an anecdote is in a different way. My own definition is simply that an anecdote is a story which has a point or moral.
Anecdotes are probably among the most powerful communications tools ever discovered by man.
Jesus used them for his teaching and we know them as parables. Abraham Lincoln used them and filled them with a wry humor that came from his boyhood on the American frontier. Once, when Lincoln was telling one of his stories at a cabinet meeting during the darkest days of the Civil War, he was criticized by a cabinet member for telling humorous stories in such terrible times. Then he asked the cabinet to read the draft of a document he had been preparing for months. It was the Emancipation Proclamation.