All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

A man--be the heavens ever praised!--is sufficient for himself.

Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.