While Fichte was delivering his Addresses in Berlin, a group of Königsberg professors formed a society known as the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, which hoped to regenerate Germany by fostering “morality, religion, serious taste, and public spirit,” and whose anti-French ravings Stein qualified as “the rage of dreaming sheep.” Another peculiar manifestation of the patriotic upsurge was the gymnastic association founded in Berlin by a school teacher, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as Turnvater — a term that can be rendered only approximately as “Father of Calisthenics.” Turnvater Jahn believed in patriotism through physical fitness and made his lads disport themselves athletically to be ready for the hour of revenge. The idea was unquestionably sound, but Jahn’s importance has been overrated by chauvinistic historians. The folklore known as classroom history has attributed a greater role to the Königsberg moralists and the Berlin gymnasts in the overthrow of Napoleon than they dese5rve; but for the reform of the Prussian army and Napoleons debacle in Russia they might still be there, practicing virtue and kneebends, without ever having slain a single Frenchman.

Lord Froth: But there is nothing more unbecoming a Man of Quality, than to Laugh; ‘tis such a vulgar Expression of the Passion! every Body can laugh.

Failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves.

I advise you to cultivate in private life that paternal and pliant character you display in government and to apply to public business the severity you show in your household.

Albuera was the bloodiest battle in the entire war — of the sixty-five hundred British infantry taking part in it, more than two-thirds were killed or wounded. [French General] Soult could not understand what had happened. “They could not be persuaded they were beaten,” he wrote of the English. “They were completely beaten, the day was mine, and they didn’t know it and wouldn’t run.” As a matter of fact, seeing the number of his casualties, [English General] Beresford did think that he had been beaten and said as much in his report to Wellington. “This won’t do,” Wellington replied. “It will drive the people in England mad. Write me down a victory.” Beresford wrote down a victory, and a victory it has been ever since. Thus, sometimes, are battles won.

This is the primitive foundation of all human language — what might be called the granite. Argot swarms with words of this kind, root-words, made out of whole cloth, we know not where nor by whom, without etymology, without analogy, without derivation, solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which have a singular power of expression, and which are all alive.

Argot, being the idiom of corruption, is easily corrupted. Moreover, as it always seeks disguise so soon as it perceives it is understood, it transforms itself. Unlike all other vegetation, every ray of light upon it kills what it touches. Thus argot goes on decomposed and recomposed incessantly; an obscure and rapid process which never ceases. It changes more in ten years than the language in ten centuries.

All the words of this language are perpetually in flight, like the men who use them.

Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.