The student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as problems.

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all.

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

Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

There is an old motto that runs, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." This is nonsense. It ought to read, "If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once."

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.