Stephen Leacock Quotes

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.

The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

A barber is by nature and inclination a sport. He can tell you at what exact hour the ball game is to begin, can foretell its issue without losing a stroke of the razor, and can explain the points of inferiority of all the players, as compared with the better men that he has personally seen elsewhere, with the nicety of a professional.

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

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit

Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.

I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. Hence the huge exaggerations of primitive literature, giants, miracles, wonders! It's the size that counts. They did it with lies and we do it with statistics: but it's all the same.

The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead.

He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

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.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

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

A lone maple leaf resting on sand Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it, and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.

If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

With the Great Detective, to think was to act, and to act was to think. Frequently he could do both together.

Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it.

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway.

The Victorians needed parody. Without it their literature would have been a rank and weedy growth, over-watered with tears.

The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.

Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect.

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

What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.

It is to be observed that 'angling' is the name given to fishing by people who can't fish.

We think of the noble object for which the professor appears tonight, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at the professor.

About the only good thing you can say about old age is, it's better than being dead!

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

I owe a lot to my teachers and mean to pay them back some day.

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

The great man... walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates on his goloshes as he passes.

Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.

Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Chess is one long regret.

If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

Humour is essentially a comforter, reconciling us to things as they are in contrast to things as they might be.

The road comes to an end just when it ought to be getting somewhere. The passengers alight, shaken and weary, to begin, all over again, something else.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.