The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. “You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

But I could never have done it," he objected, "without everyone else's help." "That may be true," said Reason gravely,"but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.

And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

AHA!" interrupted Officer Shrift, making another note in his little book. "Just as I thought: boys are the cause of everything.