Stephen Leacock Quotes

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

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

It may be that those who do most dream most.

The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.

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

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

Advertising may be described as 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.

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

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.

I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

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

A sportsman is a man who every now and then simply has to get out and kill something. Not that he's cruel. He wouldn't hurt a fly. It's not big enough.

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

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.

When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

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

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

You encourage a comic man too much and he gets silly.

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.

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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