69 Stephen Leacock Quotes

Stephen Leacock quotes

1. Special Correspondence. I learn from a very high authority, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, (speaking to me at a place which I am not allowed to indicate and in a language which I am forbidden to use)--that Austria-Hungary is about to take a diplomatic step of the highest importance. What this step is, I am forbidden to say. But the consequences of it--which unfortunately I am pledged not to disclose--will be such as to effect results which I am not free to enumerate.

2. 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?

3. The rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence.

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

5. 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.

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

7. With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.

8. Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself--either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

9. Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written 'Alice in Wonderland' than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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

11. Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

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

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

14. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

20. It may be those who do most, dream most.

21. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

27. Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits.

28. 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.

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

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

31. Synopsis of Previous Chapters: There are no Previous Chapters.

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

33. 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.

34. The general idea, of course, in any first-class laundry is to see that no shirt or collar ever comes back twice.

35. 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.

36. 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.'

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

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

39. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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

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

5. Chess is one long regret.

6. 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.

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

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

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

10. 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.

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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. There is an old motto that runs, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." This is nonsense. It ought to read, "If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit at once."

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

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

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

19. 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.

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

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

22. All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.

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

24. 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.

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

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

27. 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.

28. 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.

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

30. In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.