Lincoln’s Wit/Wisdom 53

Lincoln ‘was a most teachable man, and asked questions with a childlike simplicity which would have been too much for the false pride of many a man far less well informed. His fund of knowledge was, as he himself declared, very largely made up of information obtained in conversation.' If Lincoln's knowledge was 'not so well arranged and digested as if it had been the accumulation of careful and exact research, it included a vast amount of information hardly to be found in books.'
- William O. Stoddard