We no longer have to prove that it pays to know, to really know almost anything that is worth while. It pays in money, if that is what one wants; it pays in the more enduring satisfactions of life, in the pleasure that comes from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, in the almost unique joy of creation without the responsibilities of possession, and in the feeling of individual readiness to be of use in meeting the problems which the years allotted to your generation will surely bring forth.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Commencement address delivered at the University of Michigan, June 26, 1919.