A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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.

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

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.