“You'll find that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.”

“The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.”

“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.”

“if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.”

“Don't try to leave for there's so very much to do, and you still have over eight hundred years to go on the first job.' 'But why do only unimportant things?' 'Think of all the trouble it saves. If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.”

“...it's not just learning that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.”

“What a shame," signed the Dodecahedron. "They're so very useful. Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?""Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped."I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.""That's absurd," objected Milo, whose head was spinning from all the numbers and questions."That may be true," he acknowledged, "but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.”