Books

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

-Mark Twain

Beliefs

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions
are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without
examination, from authorities who have not themselves
examined the questions at issue but have taken them at
second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions
about them were not worth a brass farthing.

— Mark Twain