Stephen Leacock Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions

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

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

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

A 'Grand Old Man'. That means on our continent any one with snow white hair who has kept out of jail till eighty.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages -- a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu.

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.

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.

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.

All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Chess is one long regret.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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