Stephen Leacock Quotes

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

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

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

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

Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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.

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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

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

The only time when you and I really entered into literature, entered the kingdom of letters, was when each of us sat as a child absorbed in the magic pages of a book: in some snug corner of a quiet room or sheltered in some lost recess of the seashore with the muffled sound of the wind and sea to concentrate our thought - that is reading, that is literature.

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

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

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.

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

But after all
I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion
why bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to choose
with an eye to having a really pleasant life
between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have several friends who are completely ruined
some two or three times
in a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best at the house of a ruined man.

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.

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.

Have just been reading in the press the agonizing statement that there are only 4,000,000,000,000 cords of pulp wood left in the world, and that in another fifty years it will be all gone.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

All the books and instructions insist that the selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the need of "a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen." This I have never seen. My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of mind that I don't know what loam is.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

My judgment is that the rich undergo cruel trials and bitter tragedies of which the poor know nothing. In the first place I find that the rich suffer perpetually from money troubles. The poor sit snugly at home while sterling exchange falls ten points in a day. Do they care? Not a bit. An adverse balance of trade washes over the nation like a flood. Who have to mop it up? The rich. Call money rushes up to a hundred per cent, and the poor can still sit and laugh at a ten cent moving picture show and forget it. But the rich are troubled by money all the time.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Suppose a would-be writer can't begin? I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. "He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day," says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece
the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can't. It's too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books.

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.

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

Education that stops with school stops where it is beginning.

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.

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

Boarding-House Geometry DEFINITIONS AND AXIOMS All boarding-houses are the same boarding-house. Boarders in the same boarding-house and on the same flat are equal to one another. A single room is that which has no parts and no magnitude. The landlady of a boarding-house is a

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

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

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?

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

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

Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater Testimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all right if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit." It went to his heart like a barbed thorn, and stayed there.

You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle, and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because perhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all. Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at the time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory, and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking for mugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his little study upstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of Palestine," looking for a mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in the greater days of Judea.

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.

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

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.