Stephen Leacock Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Chess is one long regret.

Professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.