royal road to

royal road to (something)

The easiest, most direct, or most effective way to reach or achieve something. The institution is the lone royal road to getting work as a filmmaker in this country, effectively creating a monopoly within the industry that they are free to exploit. If they can win their division, they will be on the royal road to the championship during the playoffs.
See also: road, royal
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

royal road to

a way of attaining or reaching something without trouble.
This expression alludes to a remark attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid ( c .300 bc ). When the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy I asked whether geometry could not be made easier, Euclid is said to have replied: ‘There is no royal road to geometry’.
See also: road, royal
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • royal road to (something)
  • set out (one's) stall
  • set out your stall
  • stall
  • put (something) up to (someone or something)
  • quo
  • challenge the status quo
  • status
  • it is all up with
  • it is all up with (someone or something)
References in classic literature
"Have a small Sullivan first: it's the royal road to a cigar.
The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers.
There's no royal road to learning; and what is life but learning!'
Fazal added that Pakistan is a self-sufficient and independent state and we should not indulge in inferiority complex, adding that we will have to overcome these weaknesses and the royal road to get rid of these, is to take all the stakeholders along.
They cover elements of Hilbert space theory, Sobolev lattices, linear partial differential equations with constant coefficients, linear evolution equations, some evolution equations of mathematical physics, a royal road to initial boundary value problems.
"And what about the poor?" To paraphrase Euclid, there is no royal road to reform.
THE ROYAL ROAD TO JOY: THE BEATITUDES AND THE EUCHARIST.
It was a small step from there to conclude that the Beatitudes are a way to God, a "royal road to joy." Their connection to the Mass was clear.
His point in so doing was to show that a workable comprehension of reality was best arrived at through careful attentiveness rather than via any "royal road to logic," which would at best occlude real thought and at worst offer up hypotheses in the form of false--if ornamental--truths.
For that reason, he wrote, "the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
The Museo Rural Posta de Sisacate integrates the chains of postas that linked the ancient royal road to Peru.
In 1971, when novelist Stephen Amidon was 12 years old, he moved with his family from suburban New Jersey to Columbia, Maryland, a "model town" founded on the idea that comprehensive, centralized city planning opened the royal road to improved quality of life.
Who would deny that liberals them selves have also planned and paved the royal road to this "end" of history?
For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most." [3] If you are planning to go to a cocktail party at an ACPE meeting, be sure you have read at least the current issue of Physician Executive so you have possible topics of conversation.