Stephen Leacock Quotes
-
In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
→ -
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
→ -
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
→ -
As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, [Judge] Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so,-not, mind you; from any political bias, for his office forbid it,-but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil.
→ -
Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman' and the axe will fall when they raise me to the degree of 'grand old man'. That means on our continent any one with snow-white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.
→ -
It's a lie, but Heaven will forgive you for it.
→ -
You frequently ask, where are the friends of your childhood, and urge that they shall be brought back to you. As far as I am able to learn, those of your friends who are not in jail are still right there in your native village. You point out that they were wont to share your gambols, If so, you are certainly entitled to have theirs now.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.
→ -
In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.
→ -
I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.
→ -
Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.
→ -
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.
→ -
The minute a man is convinced he is interesting, he isn't.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin.
→ -
I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.
→ -
Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.
→ -
A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.
→ -
Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.
→ -
My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
→ -
There is no doubt that many things in life come to us...at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
→ -
I am what is called a professor emeritus—from the Latin e, 'out,' and meritus, 'so he ought to be.
→ -
Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than two square meals.
→
Related Authors
-
Mark Twain Author -
Lucy Maud Montgomery Author -
Mazo de la Roche Author -
Arthur Conan Doyle Physician -
John McCrae Lieutenant colonel -
Margaret Laurence Novelist -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Dave Kellett Cartoonist -
Robertson Davies Novelist -
Pierre Berton Author -
O. Henry Writer -
Samuel Butler Author -
Patrick deWitt Novelist -
Keith Johnstone Playwright -
Jack London Author -
James De Mille Writer -
Mordecai Richler Author -
Robert W. Service Poet -
Leo Tolstoy Writer -
Hugh MacLennan Author