Truth

You can control nothing but your own mind.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

The Bodleian at this moment harbours within its walls well-nigh half a million of printed volumes, some scores of precious manuscripts in all the tongues, and has become a name famous throughout the whole civilized world.

A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.

It is perhaps best not to make too great demands upon our slender stock of deep emotions.

Sir Thomas Bodley's Library at Oxford is, all will admit, a great and glorious institution, one of England's sacred places.

It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.

Oxford has never loved Commissioners revising her statutes and reforming her schools.

They were barbarians and wreckers.

The books and manuscripts being thus for sale, the wooden shelves, desks, and seats of the old library, and for the most part the contents of the library had been rescued from miserable ill-usage in the monasteries and chapter-houses where they had their first habitations.

I seldom tire of retracing with my own hand the ipsissima verba whereby great and truly notable gifts have been bestowed upon nations or Universities or even municipalities for the advancement of learning and the spread of science.

The plain intention of an honest man.

Bodley was always on the look-out for gifts and bequests from his store of honourable friends.

He did all a poor Protestant can do to tempt generosity.

He never even for a day dismounted his hobby, but rode it manfully to the last.

The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat.

So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

The beliefs about right and wrong which guide our actions in dealing with men in society, and the beliefs about physical nature which guide our actions in dealing with animate and inanimate bodies, these never suffer from investigation; they can take care of themselves.

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.