Stephen Leacock Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as problems.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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