Stephen Leacock - Literary Lapses (1910)

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

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

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

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
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
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
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