"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."

Source: Thomas Carlyle (1852). “On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures, Reported, with Emendations and Additions”, p.255