Stephen Leacock quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stephen Leacock

Stephen Leacock Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stephen Leacock on Wise Famous Quotes.

There is no doubt that many things in life come to us ... at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.

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

I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.

You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.

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

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

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.

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

In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post-mortem. They

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.

The English are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.

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

Concealed from view a face so face-like in its appearance as to be positively facial.

My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.

You can never have international peace as long as you have national poverty.

The tears of childhood fall fast and easily, and evil be to him who makes them flow.

To me, as a lover of Nature, the waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed to me except by seeing a tree wave.

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.

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

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

American politicians do anything for money ... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.

I am what is called a professor emeritus - from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.

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

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

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" in order to avoid libel suits.

Chess is one long regret.

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

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

When actors begin to think, it's time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

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

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

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.

Education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

Surely if we all try hard, we can all lift ourselves up high above the average. It looks a little difficult mathematically, but that's nothing.

Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which faraway people know for certain is that McGill University is in it.

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

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

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.

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

The attempt to make the consumption of beer criminal is as silly and as futile as if you passed a law to send a man to jail for eating cucumber salad.

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

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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

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.

It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.

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

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

Many a man inlove with a dimple makes the mistake of marring the whole Girl

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

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

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself
it is the occurring which is difficult.

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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

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

Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

It was Einstein who made the real trouble. He announced in 1905 that there was no such thing as absolute rest. After that there never was.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

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

broke into a blaze of effulgence.

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

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

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.

Too much has been said of the heroes of history-the strong men, the troublesome men; too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.

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.

A silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin.

Humour in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it.

The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: 'Willie is no good; I'll sell him.

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