Stephen Leacock Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
All very old men have splendid educations; all men who apparently know nothing else have thorough classical educations; nobody has an average education.

Stephen Leacock
Dear Sir, — We beg to acknowledge your letter of application and checque for fifteen dollars. After careful comparison of your case with the average modern standard, we are pleased to accept you as a first-class risk.

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

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

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

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

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
His brain trained by long years of high living and plain thinking had become too subtle, too refined an instrument for arithmetic..

Stephen Leacock
"I've been reading some very interesting statistics," he was saying to the other thinker. "Ah, statistics!" said the other, "wonderful things, sir, statistics; very fond of them myself."

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
All physicists sooner or later say, "Let us call it Entropy..."

Stephen Leacock