"You will bring with you from your books and solitary reveries a wrong measure of men and things, unless you correct it by careful experience and mixed observation.
You will raise your standard of character as much too high at first, and from disappointed expectation, it will sink too low afterwards. But you had, after all, better wait and see what things are than try to anticipate the results. You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
You will find the business of life conducted on a much more varied and individual scale than you would expect. People will be concerned about a thousand things that you have no idea of, and will be utterly indifferent to what you feel the greatest interest in. You will find good and evil, folly and discretion, more mingled, and the shades of character running more into each other than they do in the ethical charts. No one is equally wise or guarded at all points, and it is seldom that any one is quite a fool.
Do not be surprised when you go out into the world to find men talk exceedingly well on different subjects who do not derive their information immediately from books. Common sense is not a monopoly, and experience and observation are sources of information open to the common man of the world as well as to the educated student. If you may know more of the outline and principles, he knows more of the details and practice of life. A man may give a singular account of the method of drying teas in China without being a profound chemist. It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books. If you want to avoid it I urge you and thereby save yourself the pain and mortification that must ensue from finding out your mistake continually." William Hazlitt.
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