There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.