you get the feeling that the first personal pronoun is being
overworked, I remind you that this is more a confession than a lecture.
You cannot confess without referring to the confesser.

To Everybody in My Audience

I like you because I am like you.

I believe in you because I believe in myself. We are all one family. I
believe in your Inside, not in your Outside, whoever you are, whatever
you are, wherever you are.

I believe in the Angel of Good inside every block of human marble. I
believe it must be carved out in The University of Hard Knocks.

I believe all this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness,
hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside that must be chipped away.

I believe the Hard Knocks cannot injure the Angel, but can only reveal
it.

I hope you are getting your Hard Knocks.

I care little about your glorious or inglorious past. I care little
about your present. I care much about your future for that is to see
more of the Angel in you.

The University of Hard Knocks

Chapter I

The Books Are Bumps

THE greatest school is the University of Hard Knocks. Its books are
bumps.

Every bump is a lesson. If we learn the lesson with one bump, we do not
get that bump again. We do not need it. We have traveled past it. They
do not waste the bumps. We get promoted to the next bump.

But if we are "naturally bright," or there is something else the matter
with us, so that we do not learn the lesson of the bump we have just
gotten, then that bump must come back and bump us again.

Some of us learn to go forward with a few bumps, but most of us are
"naturally bright" and have to be pulverized.

The tuition in the University of Hard Knocks is not free. Experience is
the dearest teacher in the world. Most of us spend our lives in the
A-B-C's of getting started.

We matriculate in the cradle.

We never graduate. When we stop learning we are due for another bump.

There are two kinds of people--wise people and fools. The fools are the
people who think they have graduated.

The playground is all of God's universe.

The university colors are black and blue.

The yell is "ouch" repeated ad lib.

The Need of the Bumps

When I was thirteen I knew a great deal more than I do now. There was a
sentence in my grammar that disgusted me. It was by some foreigner I
had never met. His name was Shakespeare. It was this:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, l