Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

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.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!

The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.