Stephen Leacock Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

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
When Rutherford was done with the atom all the solidity was pretty well knocked out of it.

Stephen Leacock
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."

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself—either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

Stephen Leacock
Writing is simple: you just jot down amusing ideas as they occur to you. The jotting presents no problem; it is the occurring that is difficult.

Stephen Leacock
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike—information and wit.

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

Stephen Leacock
Many of us can still remember the social nuisance of the inveterate punster. This man followed conversation as a shark follows a ship.

Stephen Leacock
Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. 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 between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Stephen Leacock
Synopsis of Previous Chapters: There are no Previous Chapters.

Stephen Leacock
'What are you painting?' I said. 'Is it the Heavenly Child?' 'No' he said, 'It is a cow.'

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
The Lord said "Let there be wheat" and Saskatchewan was born.

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

Stephen Leacock
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? You hadn't realized it. And you notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew it—and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape. That's retirement.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.

Stephen Leacock
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.

Stephen Leacock
The rushing of his spirit from its prison-house was as rapid as a hunted cat passing over a garden fence.

Stephen Leacock
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.

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

Stephen Leacock
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?

Stephen Leacock