Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal, It won't learn him the river.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.1908, notebook

These are very practical things, very important things.

I never really was much of a practical jokester or anything.

No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle

I never let practical considerations clutter my youthful dreams.