Stephen Leacock's Quotes

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

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

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

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

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

The Lord said 'let there be wheat' and Saskatchewan was born.

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.

What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years.

A sportsman is a man who every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

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

Each section of the British Isles has its own way of laughing, except Wales, which doesn't.

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.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

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

It may be those who do most, dream most.